his manners imposing and dignified; yet when
once roused he rushes forward with a furious impetuosity which his
enemies have learned to estimate and dread. His eloquence is wonderful,
and after success he throws aside his solemnity and gives himself up
with wild abandon to the feast, the dance and the song. All this various
character he has imparted to his national music: it is full of pathos
and earnestness, yet often impetuous and even hilarious. The "Rakotzy"
is so perfectly national that it thrills like a shout from the Hungarian
heart, and it is no wonder that the Austrian government found it
necessary to forbid it to be played on public occasions, and even to
confiscate all printed copies of it. "When I hear the 'Rakotzy,'" said a
famous Hungarian, "I feel as if I must arise and conquer the world." As
my readers can easily procure a copy of it, it would be a kind of
sacrilege to give so grand a march shorn of any of its noble
proportions; and I can with far more justice give an example which
embraces two of the most predominant traits of Hungarian songs--the
Scotch _catch_ introduced in the middle or end of the bar, instead of at
the beginning as in Scotch music, and the beautiful modulations from the
major to the minor key of the minor third--a change very unusual in any
national music but the Hungarian:

[Illustration: HUNGARIAN AIR.]

We cannot leave Hungarian music without noticing the fact that it has
been greatly influenced by the gypsies of that country, by whom it is
mainly cultivated as an art. In Hungary, indeed, there is no stately
festival, no public rejoicing, no private merrymaking, without some
gypsy band; and it would be impossible to find more sympathetic
interpreters of its intense and passionate spirit. But if professional
musicians, they are nomadic ones: they wander through all the towns and
villages of Transylvania and Wallachia, and are everywhere welcome. In
dance-music the life and impetuosity of their musical movements, their
varying rhythms and the strange thrill of their wild dissonances are
absolutely enthralling. Charles Boner, in his work on Transylvania, says
that even the aged find it impossible to resist the dance when a gypsy
band invites them to it. Their prelude is slow and sonorous, the music
quickens, there is a rush of tones, the fantastic melody hastens on at a
head-long pace--every one, old and young, is under its spell.

Many of the Hungarian gypsies are composers as w