say
that he was a drunkard, but he was not overcautious in his potations,
and frequently took more than was prudent or consistent with a regard
to health. This weakness was purely the result of his fondness for
genial society, for he was not a solitary drinker, and invariably
devoted the early portion of the day to work. The enormous mass of his
compositions sufficiently proves his capacity for hard and unremitting
labour, and no diminution of energy was observable to the very last.
It is not easy for us at this distance of time, and with our colder
Northern temperament, to comprehend the romantic feelings of attachment
subsisting between Schubert and some of his friends,--feelings which,
however, are by no means rare among the impulsive youth of South
Germany,--but his naive simplicity, cheerful and eminently sociable
disposition, insensibility to envy, and incorruptible modesty, were
qualities calculated to transform the respect due to his genius into a
strong personal liking. Schubert was, in truth, a child of nature, one
whom to know was to love; for his faults might be summed up into a
general incapacity to understand his own interests, and it might be
said of him as truly as of any one that he was no man's enemy save his
own, thus reversing Shakespeare's words, the good which he did lives
after him; the evil was interred with his bones."

ROUGET DE LISLE.

During the great English revolution of 1688, Lord Wharton, as Macaulay
says, wrote "a satirical ballad on the administration of Tyrconnel. In
this little poem an Irishman congratulates a brother Irishman, in a
barbarous jargon, on the approaching triumph of popery, and of the
Milesian race. The Protestant heir will be excluded. The Protestant
officers will be broken. The Great Charter, and the praters who appeal
to it, will be hanged in one rope. The good Talbot will shower
commissions on his countrymen, and will cut the throats of the English.
These verses, which were in no respect above the ordinary standard of
street poetry, had for burden some gibberish which was said to have
been used as a watchword by the insurgents of Ulster in 1641. The
verses and the tune caught the fancy of the nation. From one end of
England to the other, all classes were constantly singing this idle
rhyme. It was especially the delight of the English army. More than
seventy years after the revolution, a great writer delineated, with
exquisite skill, a veteran who