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Scan 73
Old Violins And Their Makers, 1883
4 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 59. See the scan on archive.org.
1and his tickets are found as represented on page 50. The letters "I.H.S.," under the reduplicated cross, are accepted as the initials of "Jesus Hominum Salvator," and Freemasons will be familiar with the advocacy which traces them to the altars of Bacchus as an inscription of the Greek letters, Iota, Eta, and Sigma, and also to the phrase, "In hoc signo vinces," at sight of which, in the heavens, Constantine was said to have become a Christian, the name "Jesu" having been indicated by its initial letters in Greek, and so on.
3Antonio Stradivari, the greatest known violin maker that ever lived, was born, it is assumed, in Cremona, in 1644. This date is not derived from any entry in Cremonese registers, no trace of his birth having been found in these, so far as they have yet been searched. It is conjectured that the registers in which his name may have appeared have been, at some time, carried away or destroyed, when some of the churches in Cremona were suppressed. The circumstance which fixes the date is the following: Among the papers of a Signor Carlo Carli, a banker of Milan, there was found an inventory of the instruments which belonged to Count Cozio di Salabue. In this inventory a violin was mentioned bearing a ticket in the handwriting of Stradivari, in which his name, his age, and the date of the violin were given. His age then was ninety-two years, and the date of the violin was 1736. Although it is not said that the violin or the ticket was seen, it is to be presumed that the handwriting was compared with other specimens of his in existence, and the date of his birth then fixed accordingly, as given above. The name Stradivari has been found in the records of Cremona as
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