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124 National Music of the World.
fortune, a sort of French Dibdin, who wrote songs and composed music to them in an irregular way of his own, but in which there was something of art as well as of poetry: a man who was pitied and assisted by Eeranger, and who died in misery and want. His collection of fifty 'Songs of France' is a rather sad comment on the elastic nature of his patriotism, ranging as it does betwixt the years 1776 and 1821, and cemprising all manner of hymns got up for all manner of triumphant occasions—Republican, Imperial, and Legitimist.
'La Marseillaise,' purported to have been written, words and music, at Strasbourg in the year 1792, called originally the song of 'The Rhine Army' by the author, who seems to have been wandering in want of bread, and re-christened after its appearance in a journal of Marseilles—was by no means De Lille's first essay. Now it is possible that the Meersburg mass referred to may have been heard by him at Strasbourg, though hardly probable—seeing that then the places were two days' journey apart: seeing that every Catholic town had its affluence of small composers; and it is possible that he may have pillaged it of the 'Credo' and twisted that hymn literally to his own patriotic uses. |
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