Stradella's kinsfolk yet in Italy may know, or may not know, the hymn which once saved his life. They may pass over the hymn as a tiresome affair, necessary on holy-days, or they may look upon it as a lucky omen--how lucky!--for them. But what they ought to do is to pay it excessive ancestral honors; and canon law, the wide world over, would acquit them of the idolatry. Music, indeed, has been potent, first and last, in the crises of men. It becomes a factor of enormous importance in more than one history, if you search for it. Never do some of us hear that plaintive old song of Locke's, _My Lodging is on the Cold Ground_, without thinking of James Radcliffe, third Earl of Derwentwater, who had apparently no connection with it, but whom one finds himself regarding as its very harmony forwarded into another age, like Arethusa stream returned from underground. Fresh from the composer's meditations, it was sung on the stage by the comely Moll Davies (said to be daughter to the Earl of Berkshire), before the notorious Persian person who then graced the English throne, and who was struck immediately with an excellence new as Locke's, and hardly of a contrapuntal nature. Time conjured up, from the bonnie comedian and the bad king, the innocent figure of a girl, Mary, who duly married a great noble, and vanished into history as the early-dying mother of the most stainless knight outside of a romance. Derwentwater was grandson, indeed, to vagabonds; but was he not great-grandson to the sweetest of the fine arts? His present representative, Lord Petre, may not openly refer one branch of his lineage to an origin which might seem more frankly fabulous than any divine descent of the ancients. At any rate, here is music of the seventeenth century, going its operative channel through imperfect humanity, and upspringing in the wild days of the Jacobite '15, into corporate beauty again: into a young life, dowered to the full with the strange winning charm of the Stuarts, and with a halo about it which they can scarcely boast. And therefore, reverting to "the source and spring of things," one is free to cry: "Well done, Master Matthew Locke, in F minor!" which is indeed reputed by tradition, the right heroic key. But who, writing of the darling of the legends of the North, will be bold enough to set _My Lodging is on the Cold Ground_ in full song, on his genealogical tree? James the First and Charles the First will be sure to show up there, and so will a number of other Britons not especially germane to the matter. This is how we forge pedigrees, in our blunt literal way, skipping over the vital forces, and laboriously reckoning the mediums and the tools of our own species. Any hard-headed encyclopedia will accredit an advocate of Ajaccio and his wife Letitia with the introduction into the nineteenth century of its most amazing man; but to William Hazlitt, an expert among paradoxes, Bonaparte was "the child and champion" of the Revolution.