Books › Old violins, 1905 › scan 247
Scan 247
Old violins, 1905
10 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 225. See the scan on archive.org.
1my room playing upon it with delight, and pronounced it a genuine Strad beyond a question. It was a Lupôt for all that.
3As for your ordinary amateur, he will judge by an old-looking label, being unaware that forgers keep old battered counterfeit type in stock, or he will note the place of the little buttons which fasten the inner blocks, supposing that each maker had his favourite position for these buttons from which he never deviated. Others will prate about Strad's wasp sting purfle running counter to the angle of his corners, or declare that one maker never made his back in two pieces, whilst another never made it otherwise.
5But there is one mark occasionally found in old Italian violins which I do not remember to have seen forged or imitated, or indeed even so much as alluded to by any writer.
7If the amateur happens to have an instrument with a little round hole in the back of his fiddle a few inches below the nut, filled up skilfully so as to be almost imperceptible, he may be quite sure he has got an old violin, probably one of the oldest, as the practice of falling suddenly on the knees and letting the violin hang, in processions in which the singers went before and the minstrels followed after, has long been abandoned.
9That little hole, so cunningly plugged, shows the place where a slight chain connected the instrument to a button-screw or hook, so that at the elevation of the Host, the minstrel might suddenly fall on his knees
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