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 Rodney Blake, which was a pseudonym used by William Montgomery Clemens, included it in a collection of After-dinner Verse, and for a while he was credited with being its author. Then somebody claimed that it had been written by a wandering newspaperman named A. M. R. Gordon; but presently it was discovered that that, too, was a pseudonym. But it was the pseudonym of the real author, Alexander Macgregor Rose, and the whole story at last came out of Montreal, Canada, where Rose had written the poem during the last year of his life, and where he had died.

It is an everlasting pity that "Hoch! der Kaiser" does not belong to American literature, but it was written by a Scotchman, and first appeared in the columns of the Montreal Daily Herald.

Alexander Macgregor Rose was born in the village of Tomantoul, South Banffshire, Scotland, on August 7, 1846. After attending the village school, he went to the grammar school at Aberdeen, where in 1863 he gained the Macpherson bursary of twenty pounds. He entered the University of Aberdeen the same year, and finished his arts course in the spring of 1867. During the next three years he was classical master at boarding schools in different parts of England, and in 1870 was appointed master of the Free Church school at Gairlock, Rosshire.