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Scan 202
Old Violins And Their Makers, 1883
4 lines. Read by computer on 30 September 2026. Printed page 188. See the scan on archive.org.
1extent, in this country, if not also in France, and was ultimately dethroned by the perfection of its species, the violin, whose first assaults in England he himself was destined to see; but it is evident from his words that he had not, as a musical historian of great research, the faintest shadow of a suspicion that it was possible to suppose it to be an instrument of native growth.
3I suppose Thomas Mace is the earliest English author in whose writings we find any authoritative mention of the violin of the present day. He was a professor of the lute and viol, and the instructor in music of Sir Robert Bolles. His book, "Musik's Monument," was published by subscription in 1676, and, curiously enough, among the subscribers is one William Forster, a name which, in the annals of English violin making, occupies a very high rank, and it would be interesting to know if this William Forster, of Peterborough, had any kinship with the Cumberland spinning-wheel maker of the same name, who, born some thirty-seven years later, employed his leisure time in violin making, and founded the business which was destined to shed considerable lustre on the fame, such as it was, of our native manufacture. In his treatise on the Viol, Thomas Mace says: "It may be thought I am so great a lover of the lute that I make light esteem of any other instrument besides, which truly I do not, but love the viol in a very high degree, yea, close unto the lute, and have done much more and made very many more good and able proficients upon it than ever I have done upon the lute. And this I shall presume to say, that if I excel in either it is most certainly upon the viol." After complaining about the practice of crying up any particular instru-
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