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before the Jacobite insurrection of 1745, he probably composed what Mr. George Hogarth calls "this noble strain of patriotic loyalty" in 1714 or 1715, when the landing of the Pretender was anxiously expected by all parties, and the writ of habeas corpus was suspended.

Many additional stanzas have been written to "God save the King," but none of them have established themselves as a part of the hymn. One of them is sufficiently comical to be worth noticing. It was written during the second British civil war of the last century, and after the first victories of the young Pretender, against whom was sent, among other commanders, General Wade, an officer from whom much was expected. So the lieges added a stanza to their loyal song, and sang it at both the playhouses, beginning:

"Lord grant that Marshal Wade

May, by thy mighty aid,
Victory bring."

A petition that brings to the mind some of those put up now-adays in New England, in which the petitioners, not content to ask for daily bread or other benefits in general terms, send up with their prayers special intimations of the mode in which they might most conveniently, or at least agreeably, be granted. For manifestly Wade is the individual mainly looked to; and the mighty aid plainly has its chief value in rhyming with the marshal's name, and in furnishing also a parenthetical conscience-saver, or assurance of distinguished consideration in the other quarter.

But to return to the new song which some Englishmen were singing at both the playhouses about the time of these battles, for the success of King George, while some others— these, too, the "real original Jacob-ites"-were singing it at their own houses for the success of King James.

The majestic beauty of the music of "God save the King" has won it a singular distinction which is quite inconsistent with one of the functions of a national air. It has been adopted for the national hymns of Prussia, Hanover, Weimar, Brunswick, and Saxony; so that its distinctive nationality is no longer in its music, but only in its poor, perverted, rebel-born words.

The history of the other great national hymn of the world, "The Marseillaise," for these two separate themselves by emi

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nence from all the others, -is noticeably and significantly unlike that which has just been examined. Every reader of this little book may not know all the brief history of that marvelous song, which is almost travestied in Lamartine's sentimental melodramatic account of it in the "Girondins." It received its name from the men who first made it known in Paris, the ruffian Marseillais -a horde, some five hundred strong, of the vilest and most brutal of the floating population of a Mediterranean seaport town, who were summoned to Paris by Barbaroux for the purpose of exciting and assisting at the atrocities of 1792.1 Headed by the wretch Santerre, they marched into Paris, and through its principal streets, on the 30th of July in that year, a band of swarthy, fierce, travel-soiled desperadoes, wearing red Phrygian caps wreathed with green leaves, dragging cannon, and singing as they marched, a song beginning – "Allons, enfans de la patrie,

Le jour de gloire est arrivé!
Contre nous, de la tyrannie
L'étendard sanglant est levé.
Entendez vous dans ces campaignes
Mugir ces féroces soldats!

Ils viennent jusque dans vos bras
Égorger vos fils et vos compagnes ! -

Aux armes, citoyens! formez vos bataillons!

Marchons qu'un sang impur abreuve nos sillons!"

These inflaming accents were just suited to the intense craving of the morbid appetite created by the revolution; they at once stimulated and gratified, though they could not slake it; and on that day Paris drank in with greedy ears an intoxication from which, in spite of certain seeming intervals of imposed restraint, she has been reeling ever since.

But who had done this? Not a Marseillais, not a sans-culotte, not even a revolutionist. Rouget de Lisle was none of these, but an accomplished officer: an enthusiast for liberty, it is true, but no less a champion of justice and an upholder of constitutional monarchy. He was at Strasbourg early in 1792. One day Dietrich, the mayor of the town, who knew him well, asked him to write a martial song to be sung on the departure of six hundred volunteers who would soon set out to join the army

1 This is now utterly disproved. Their enrollment lists show them to have been nearly all respectable country householders, tradesmen, etc.; and there is no proof that they were summoned to commit massacres, or did so. — ED.

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of the Rhine. De Lisle consented, wrote the song that night,the words sometimes coming to him before the music, sometimes the music before the words, and gave it to Dietrich the next morning. As is not uncommon with authors, he was at first dissatisfied with the fruit of his sudden inspiration, and as he handed the manuscript to the mayor, he said, "Here is what you asked for; but I fear it is not very good." But Dietrich looked, and knew better. They went to the harpsichord with madame and sang it; they gathered the band of the theater together and rehearsed it; it was sung in the public square, and excited such enthusiasm that, instead of six hundred volunteers, nine hundred left Strasbourg for the army. This song its author called merely "The War-Song of the Army of the Rhine" (Chant de guerre de l'armée du Rhin). But in the course of a few months it worked its way southwards, and became a favorite with the Marseillais, who carried it to Paris, where the people, knowing nothing of its name, its author, or its original purpose, spoke of it simply as "the Song of the Marseillais"; and as "The Marseillaise "it will be known forever, and forever be the rallying cry of France against tyranny.

How widely do the histories of these two hymns differ, and how characteristic is their difference of the two people who have adopted them! The British hymn, like the British constitution, the product of no man and of no time; the origin of its several parts various and uncertain, or seen darkly through the obscurity of the past; its elements the product of different peoples; broached at first in secret, and when brought to light, frowned down as treasonable, heretical, damnable: but at length openly avowed, and gradually growing into favor; modified, curtailed, added to in important points by various hands, yet remaining vitally untouched; at last accepted because it is no longer prudent to refuse to yield it place; and finally insisted upon as the time-honored palladium of British liberty. The Marseillaise, written to order, and in one night, to meet a sudden, imperative demand: struck out at the white heat of unconscious inspiration, perfect in all its parts, totus, teres, atque rotundus; and in six months adopted by the people, the army, and the legislature of the whole nation. The air of the one, simple, solid, vigorous, dignified, grand, the music of common-sense and fixed determination; the words, though poor enough, mingling trust, and prayer, and self-confidence, and

respect for whoever is above us, and a readiness to fight stoutly when God and the law are on our side: the other a war cry, a summons to instant battle, warning, appealing, denouncing, fiercely threatening the vengeance of the Furies; having no inspiration but glory, and invoking no god but liberty; beginning in deliberate enthusiasm, and ending in conscious frenzy. How different the service, too, to which the two songs have been put! The one used always to sustain, to build up, to perpetuate, to express loyalty and faithful endurance; a song of peace and plethoric festivity. The other the signal of destruction, the warning note of revolution; the song that rises from the field where the red plowshare turns up petrified abuses to the light of heaven and vengeance stalks between the stilts; the howl of famished men, and the shriek of nursing mothers whose breasts are dry. The one at best a tonic, but mostly sedative in its operation, and harmless at any time; the other from the beginning a stimulant, and to be used on great occasions only, and for great objects. The Girondists sang the first four lines of it, as except one who fell before his judges, struck through the heart with his own dagger-they turned away from the bloody tribunal which had condemned them to death in the name of the liberty they had done so much to gain. At the battle of Jemappes, at the most perilous hour of that long doubtful day, Dumouriez, finding his right wing almost without officers, and giving way before the fire of the Austrian infantry and a threatened charge of the Hussars, put himself at the head of his battalions and began to sing the Marseillaise hymn, then not many months old; the soldiers joined in the song, their courage rallied, they charged and carried all before them. And in August of the next year, at the fête of the inauguration of the constitution (always a fête and an inauguration !), when the convention and the delegates from the primary assemblies, including eighty-six doyens which seems to be French for the oldest inhabitant - to represent the eighty-six departments, assembled with a throng of "citizens generally" in the Place de la Bastille at four o'clock in the morning around a great fountain, called the Fountain of Regeneration, as soon as the first beams of the sun appeared, they saluted him by singing stanzas to the air of the Marseillaise; and then the President took a cup, poured out before the sun the waters of regeneration, and drank thereof himself, and passed the cup to the oldest inhabitants, and they also drank

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thereof, in their parochial capacity. These ways are not the ways of our race. Indeed, even if Sir John Cope had begun to sing "God save the King" at Preston-pans, or General Hawley had in like manner lifted up his voice at Falkirk, or General McDowell had favored the army with the "StarSpangled Banner" at Manassas (always supposing it to be within the compass of his voice), I doubt much whether they would have produced any change in the fortunes of those battles; nay, I fear they would have been greeted only with unseemly merriment. Sir John Cope's regulars would still have "fled in the utmost confusion at the first onset"; General Hawley's veterans would have been "broke by the first volley" and "turned their backs and fled in the utmost consternation"; and General McDowell's raw volunteers, after fighting three hours and a half against an intrenched enemy in superior force, and driving him two miles before them, would still have been seized with a sudden panic and retreated in disgraceful disorder to Washington, leaving their enemy so crippled that he could not, even if he dared, pursue them.

But differing thus entirely in spirit and origin, these celebrated songs have one historical point in common, which is interesting in itself, and full of significance to such folk as say, Go to, let us make a national hymn :- they have both been perverted from their original purpose. The British hymn, made up, as we have seen, of an air from France, and words from Jacobite Scotland, into a song praying for the scattering, the confounding, the frustrating, and the general damnation of the reigning family, with its words altered by this man and the other, and its melody doctored by this musician and its harmony by the other, has come to be the recognized formal expression of loyalty to the very house for whose overthrow it first petitioned. And as to the Marseillaise, the purpose of its author is sadly told in his sad fate. Soon proscribed as a royalist, he fled from France, and took refuge in the Alps. But the echoes of the chord that he so unwittingly had struck pursued him even to the mountain tops of Switzerland. "What," said he to a peasant guide in the upper fastnesses of the border range, "is this song I hear-Allons, enfans de la patrie?" "That? That is the Marseillaise." And thus, suffering from the excesses that he had innocently stimulated, he first learned the name which his countrymen had given to the song that he had written.

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