Books › Famous violinists and fine violins : historical notes, anecdotes, and reminiscences, 1896 › scan 118
Scan 118
Famous violinists and fine violins : historical notes, anecdotes, and reminiscences, 1896
8 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 98. See the scan on archive.org.
1gree, or genealogy, can only be made out with the greatest of difficulty and much uncertainty. It is true that the shepherd can distinguish the various sheep of his flock one from the other, as an expert botanist can distinguish mosses and grasses, though, to the uninitiated, they are all precisely alike. And so, with regard to violins, there are yet a few persons in the world whose eyes and ears are as keen for those instruments as are the eyes of the shepherd for the woolly-backed creatures of his fold.
3During the last thirty years I have had frequent opportunities of studying the instruments of the old Cremona makers, as well as others; and being, not a collector of violins, but a violinist, I am not quite so liable to be prejudiced by mere appearance or hearsay. This cannot be said of many who have been, or still are, afflicted with what may be termed the collector's craze, which can only be compared to bibliomania in literary men of morbid tendencies.
5One of the greatest violinists that ever lived, Nicolo Paganini, of Genoa, happened to play upon a violin made by a workman of Cremona, named Giuseppe Antonio Guarneri (or Guarnerius, for they had the habit of Latinising names of distinguished men in those days), which he had given to him under peculiar circumstances¹ by a wealthy French dilettante residing in Italy.
7¹ See Phipson: "Biographical Sketches and Anecdotes of Celebrated Violinists." London: R. Bentley & Son. 1877.
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