Books › Old Violins And Their Makers, 1883 › scan 217
Scan 217
Old Violins And Their Makers, 1883
2 lines. Read by computer on 1 October 2026. Printed page 203. See the scan on archive.org.
1curb, by severe penalties, the conduct of the minstrels of those times—down to perhaps two hundred years ago. The proverbs of both portions of our own country bear witness to this fact. "Fiddlers' fare, meat, drink, and money." "Fiddlers, dogs, and flesh-flies, come to feasts uncalled." There is another, of epigrammatic force, which, in an unseemly manner, compares fiddlers' wives to gamesters' ale; and even in our own day "fiddlers' money" is a current, though, luckily for them, an incorrect phrase, indicating the coin in which their services are supposed to be paid. Happily that state of things has long passed away, and the instrument which the proverb builders selected to carry their burden of contempt has become the chief factor in modern music. The reader will observe that the "Flyter" destines the condemned instrument to accompany the person to France, which was probably in the poet's mind as the place whence it came. Whether Hume made fiddles or not, we cannot, I suppose, now learn, and the next bow-instrument makers would, in point of time, be those already referred to—viz., Bolles and Ross. John Ross is said to have been "dwelling in Bridewell in 1562," and the advertisement already quoted gives some of his work the date 1598. Stow mentions a son of his who, he says, excelled his father in the manufacture of "voyal de gamboes." But before this there are evidences that violins were made in this country. There is one of English make in the South Kensington Museum, which is said to have belonged to James I., and if this is correct it indicates a great advance in position from the lowly one which the fiddle occupied in Dunbar's time. Of Bolles and
The computer misreads some letters and numbers. Where a name matters to you, read the scan.