The National Music Of The World

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	Music from the East. 61


	This specimen, which I have no reason to conceive impurely noted,-contains a clear indication of that syncopation or suspense or pause which characterises Spanish national music : which may be said in some degree to enforce a spasmodic manner on the artist who is to deliver it. This effect I take to have been the 'Hocket? which term so puzzled Sir John Hawkins when he encountered it in one of the Cotton manuscripts, that he devoted half a page to dull guesses as to its meaning,¹³ whereas the least quick- ¹³ There has been of late years a fashion to decry Burney as flippant and courtly—a flimsy musical historian—as compared with Hawkins. I can but say, that whereas the judgments and the facts of the former writer hold good, I have rarely consulted the latter with reference to any matter beyond the pale of his limited sympathies, without finding proofs of inexactness, attested by dogmatism, bearing out Johnson's definition of Sir John as a man habitually inexact. Witness his obtuse ignorance of the astounding identity be-