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But while Haydn was thus suffering from the natural disabilities
of his years, he was not wholly divorced from his art. It is true
that nothing of any real importance came from his pen after "The
Seasons," but a good deal of work of various kinds was done, some
of which it is impossible for the biographer to ignore. One
rather novel undertaking carries us back to the end of 1799,
about which time he was first asked by George Thomson, the friend
of Burns, to write accompaniments for certain Scottish songs to
be published in Thomson's well-known national collections. The
correspondence which followed is interesting in many ways, and as
it is not noticed in any other biography of Haydn, we propose to
deal with it here. [The letters passed through the
present writer's hands some five years ago, when he was preparing
his Life of George Thomson(1898). They are now in the British
Museum with the other Thomson correspondence.]
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