merits, it
always represents some genuine and usually deep-rooted conviction. It
enables us to gauge the national aspirations of the day, and to
estimate the character of the nation whose yearnings found expression in
song. The following lines--written by Bishop Still, the reputed author
of "Gammer Gurton's Needle"--very faithfully represent the feelings
excited in England at the time of the Spanish Armada:

We will not change our Credo
For Pope, nor boke, nor bell;
And yf the Devil come himself
We'll hounde him back to hell.

The fiery Protestant spirit which is breathed forth in these lines found
its counterpart in Germany. Luther, at a somewhat earlier period, wrote:

Erhalt uns, Herr, bei deinem Wort,
Und steur des Papsts und Tuerken Mord.

Take again the case of French Revolutionary poetry. The noble, as also
the ignoble, sides of that vast upheaval were alike represented in the
current popular poetry of the day. Posterity has no difficulty in
understanding why the whole French nation was thrilled by Rouget de
Lisle's famous song, to whose lofty strains the young conscripts rushed
to the frontier in order to hurl back the invaders of their country. On
the other hand, the ferocity of the period found expression in such
lines as:

Ah! ca ira, ca ira, ca ira!
Les aristocrates a la lanterne,

which was composed by one Ladre, a street singer, or in the savage
"Carmagnole," a name originally applied to a peasant costume worn in the
Piedmontese town of Carmagnola, and afterwards adopted by the Maenads
and Bacchanals, who sang and danced in frenzied joy over the judicial
murder of poor "Monsieur et Madame Veto."

The light-hearted and characteristically Latin buoyancy of the French
nation, which they have inherited from the days of that fifth-century
Gaulish bishop (Salvianus) who said that the Roman world was laughing
when it died ("moritur et ridet"), and which has stood them in good
stead in many an arduous trial, is also fully represented in their
national poetry. No other people, after such a crushing defeat as that
incurred at Pavia, would have been convulsed with laughter over the
innumerable stanzas which have immortalised their slain commander, M. de
la Palisse:

Il mourut le vendredi,
Le dernier jour de son age;
S'il fut mort le samedi,
Il eut vecu davantage.

The inchoate national aspirations, as also the grave and resolute
patriotism of the