ROUGET DE L'ISLE SINGING THE MARSEILLAISE.

Photogravure after the Picture by Pils in the Louvre.

HE Marseillaise hymn was composed at Strasburg on the night of April 24th, 1792, by Claude Joseph Rouget De L'Isle, then a cap. Stain of engineers. On April 25th it was sung at the house of the mayor (Dietrich), copied and arranged for a military band, by which it wa performed publicly for the first time at a revi w of the National guard >1 Sunday, April 29th. Grove says, in his Dictionary of Music,) that it was sung at a Civic banquet in Marseilles, on June 25th, with such effect that copies of it were printed and distributed to the volunteers then on the eve of staring to Paris. They entered Paris, July 30th, singing it, and they sang it again as they marched to the attack on the Tuileries on August roth of the same year. The picture by Pils shows, supposably, the scene of the first rendition by the composer himself, in the mayor's house on April 25th.

GEORGE JACQUES DANTON

(1759-1794)

ANTON, the greatest of the French Jacobins, and one of the most formidable figures in modern history, was born at Arcis-sur-Aube, October 28th, 1759, and he had not completed his thirty-fifth year when he went to the guillotine, declaring it better to live a poor fisherman than to have anything to do with the government of men.

That

The

No other man in modern times has so well and so reasonably embodied the latent fierceness of society. When the young French Republic was hemmed round with enemies; when all the forces of the world seemed leagued against the handful of radicals and fanatics who were attempting to make a constructive force out of the chaotic impulses of the Parisian mob, Danton gave the keynote of his own character and of the character of the great epoch which created him, in a single sentence: "To conquer we have need to dare, to dare again, always to dare; and France will be saved!" sentence and yet another of Danton's overthrew Bourbonism. other was: "Let France be free, though my name were accursed!" When a man of average abilities and average education so devotes himself to any cause that he accepts in advance, as a probable incident of his work, not merely death, but infamy, he has already more than half accomplished the possibilities of such achievement as made Danton the constructive power by virtue of which the French Republic of the last quarter of the nineteenth century developed out of the Reign of Terror. In the Arabian story those who attempt to climb an enchanted mountain to find the talisman of power at the top are assailed at every step of their upward progress by shrieks of execration from unseen enemies attacking them from behind with every imaginable calumny, every conceivable insult. Those who stop to answer or turn back to punish these intangible conservative forces" are at once transformed to smooth, black stones, destined to remain inert under the power of obstruction until some one comes, so strong, so self-contained, so capable of maintaining a set purpose, that, like Danton, he will press forward to his object without fearing either the death or the infamy with which he is threatened. Then the smooth stones once more become men, and by virtue of the