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Scan 124
Old violins and violin lore, 1900
12 lines. Read by computer on 28 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1VIOLINS IN ENGLAND
3violins and four viols," so at last the violin was creeping up; but not until Charles II.'s restoration did the full-fledged violin come in with a rush of "four-and-twenty" fiddlers, over whom presided no less a person than the immortal Thomas Purcell, who, in a brief span of life, achieved his almost Mozartian fame, and died at the early age of twenty-seven, just ten years younger than the incomparable Wolfgang Amadeus.
5The King had no doubt got his notion of fiddle bands from Louis XIII.'s "petits violons du roi;" and from the French Court, our "merrie monarch" borrowed a good many other ideas of a less respectable and harmless character.
7The King was so seriously addicted to music that he could hardly hear a sermon and never eat his dinner without the solatium of his four-and-twenty fiddlers.
9"They played before him at his meals," writes Anthony Wood in the diary of his life, "as being more airy and brisk than the viols;" and the grave Evelyn much resents the invasion of the upstart "petit violon" and its profane intrusion. He writes in 1662: "One of his Majesty's chaplains preached, after which, instead of anthem or solemn wind music accompanying the organ, was introduced a concert of twenty-four violins between every pause, in the French fantastical light way, better suiting a tavern or a playhouse than a church."
11"Tis an ill wind that blows nobody and nothing any good, and we cannot doubt that his Majesty's royal
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