gh they have put a marked impress not
only on the melodies, but also on popular taste. The Hungarian
folk-songs are a perfect reflex of the national character of the
Magyars, and some have been traced back centuries in their literature.
Though their most marked melodic peculiarity, the frequent use of a
minor scale containing one or even two superfluous seconds, as thus:

[Sidenote: _Magyar scales._]

[Music illustration]

may be said to belong to Oriental music as a whole (and the Magyars
are Orientals), the songs have a rhythmical peculiarity which is a
direct product of the Magyar language. This peculiarity consists of a
figure in which the emphasis is shifted from the strong to the weak
part by making the first take only a fraction of the time of the
second, thus:

[Music illustration]

[Sidenote: _The Scotch snap._]

[Sidenote: _Gypsy epics._]

In Scottish music this rhythm also plays a prominent part, but there
it falls into the beginning of a measure, whereas in Hungarian it
forms the middle or end. The result is an effect of syncopation which
is peculiarly forceful. There is an indubitable Oriental relic in the
profuse embellishments which the Gypsies weave around the Hungarian
melodies when playing them; but the fact that they thrust the same
embellishments upon Spanish and Russian music, in fact upon all the
music which they play, indicates plainly enough that the impulse to do
so is native to them, and has nothing to do with the national taste of
the countries for which they provide music. Liszt's confessed purpose
in writing the Hungarian Rhapsodies was to create what he called
"Gypsy epics." He had gathered a large number of the melodies without
a definite purpose, and was pondering what to do with them, when it
occurred to him that

"These fragmentary, scattered melodies were the wandering,
floating, nebulous part of a great whole, that they fully
answered the conditions for the production of an harmonious
unity which would comprehend the very flower of their
essential properties, their most unique beauties," and
"might be united in one homogeneous body, a complete work,
its divisions to be so arranged that each song would form at
once a whole and a part, which might be severed from the
rest and be examined and enjoyed by and for itself; but
which would, none the less, belong to the whole through the
close affinity of subject matter, the si