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Scan 69
Old Violins And Their Makers, 1883
4 lines. Read by computer on 30 September 2026. Printed page 55. See the scan on archive.org.
1certainly not in that. Although it has been easy to verify this date, it may not be so easy to search the records of del Jesu's native town. Cremona has before now shown itself to be a place from which it is difficult to get information, even on matters of great national importance, as witness the angry correspondence between the Italian historian Muratori and the keeper of its records at the very time (1722) when this great fiddle-maker lived: "Si voi siete conservatore di cotesta città solamente per conservarne sepolte quelle storie vecchie che potrebbero far onore alla patria vostra, &c., io vi sosterrò con carta, penna e calamaio che voi siete un cattivo conservatore." Perhaps in the present day they would be more amenable to reason on behalf of one of her humble but most useful sons, whose reputation has possibly been blasted by careless, if not malevolent talk. It cannot be a novel saying, even to those who do not profess to draw their maxims from Holy Writ, that "the tongue is an unruly member, and is set on fire of hell."
3Whether investigators are or are not successful in this direction, that irrational and paradoxical bequest will remain an unanswerable protest against the small cohort of prison fiddles and the large army of barefaced imitations which seem to derive a sort of glory from their imperfections. I cannot refrain from saying that to continue to adhere to the terms of that bequest is a decidedly false reverence towards the testator, who must have been either at a moment of weakness when he made it or actuated by motives the reverse of artistic. It was this same great violin which Paganini took one day in 1836 to Vuillaume, in Paris, in order to get it repaired.
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