T is not a little curious that the nation which held for so long the supreme position in the musical world should never yet have succeeded in creating a national anthem of its own. Germany subsisted for many years on an adaptation from the English God save the King, and later she adopted, as Deutschland iiber Alles, the Austrian Hymn which Haydn either composed or took from a Croatian source. The FrancoPrussian war of 1870 produced nothing of greater moment on either side than some patriotic songs of very moderate artistic value, belonging in fact to the same class as our Red, White, and Blue or the Jingo ditty which supplied a nickname for the patriotic party in England in the days when patriotism was out of fashion. Such compositions, like Partant pour la Syrie, could only be called national songs by a stretch of terms. So great was Germany's reputation in music that the absurd claim of a German origin for our own national anthem was believed by large numbers of amateurs in England, who in those days thought nothing good in music had ever been produced in England. In Germany itself, of course, many people grew up naively regarding the English tune as their own; and there is a story of a German cook, engaged by Sir Charles Halle, who, on the morning after her arrival in London, appeared with her eyes full of tears, saying that she had heard a street band playing her own national anthem as a pretty compliment to herself. Unfortunately for the German claim, as we shall see later on, the original adapter of the song had the grace to acknowledge the truth in his title-page. We may dismiss the very weak claim advanced on behalf of a French origin in 1834, in the fictitious Souvenirs de la Marquise de Crequi, 1710 a 1800, in which it was implied that Lully wrote the tune and that it was appropriated by Dr. John Bull, of St. Paul's. As Lully was born five years after the death of Bull, this charge of appropriation cannot be established. The attribution of the air to Bull (who, by the way, was never organist of St. Paul's), rests on curiously insecure foundations; there exists