Books › Old violins and violin lore, 1900 › scan 130
Scan 130
Old violins and violin lore, 1900
14 lines. Read by computer on 28 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1VIOLINS IN ENGLAND
3with a desire to possess themselves of an instrument which they had heard discourse such excellent music and to the purpose.
5Indeed, I have sometimes known professors in these days who would so cunningly play to their pupils that they have been able to palm off for considerable sums quite inferior instruments.
7How much more easy must it have been for the man who made them, and made none but the best, and played them on occasions when his purchasers' spirits were high and their dispositions yielding, to dispose of his exceptional wares.
9About 1759 Forster seems to have concluded that Cumberland was played out, and, sighing for new worlds to conquer, he came south. He was quite a young man, but in the great whirlpool of London, as it was even then, he seems to have sunk so low as cattle-driving, but that is in itself a tribute to his versatility and pluck. Presently he sets up in the Commercial Road, East, but finding there neither demands for spinning-wheels nor fiddles, takes to gunstock-making, till he at last "strikes ile" with one Beck, of Tower Hill, and there makes such fiddles that Beck grows fat while Forster remains lean.
11Unable to get his wages raised, he leaves Beck in 1762, and sets up at Duke's Court, a site now occupied by the National Gallery.
13For about ten years Forster adopted the high Stainer pattern, then so popular in England, and attracted the patronage of amateurs like Colonel West. Afterwards
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