Books › Old violins and violin lore, 1900 › scan 129
Scan 129
Old violins and violin lore, 1900
26 lines. Read by computer on 28 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1OLD VIOLINS
3Kensington Loan Collection of 1872, but one of them, dated 1690, had been cut down.
5It remained for Stradiuarius, in the dawning year of the eighteenth century, to discover and fix the model of the bass viol that needed no cutting down.
7The musical world owes a debt of eternal gratitude to the Forster family; there were four of them.
9"Great-grandfather John (1683), maker of spinning-wheels and violins.
11"Grandfather William, the Forster, commonly called 'Old Forster.'
13"Father William, No. 2, who also made spinning-wheels.
15"William, No. 3 (1764–1824)."
17His sons, the two brothers William (1733–1824), and Simon Andrew (1731–1869).
19The second Forster (1739–1807), William, called "Old Forster," bears off the palm.
21Born in the north, a native of Brampton, he made his market, like his father, out of the spinning-wheel industry of Cumberland, but he was a many-sided man, a great repairer of viols, and afterwards a maker of violins, the greatest maker in the north—the greatest maker in all England.
23He commended his violins to the public by playing on them himself. He was not beneath playing at country dances and on village greens.
25We may be sure he never lost an opportunity of parting, for a consideration, with the violin he played upon—since, naturally, people would often be seized
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