Books › Old violins and violin lore, 1900 › scan 134
Scan 134
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
3ing away to assure himself that his beloved was uninjured.
5Mr. Lucas had an excellent Benjamin Banks violin, but Banks tenors and violoncellos are more esteemed. Banks made no double-basses; his varnish is yellow-brown, of excellent quality, but badly laid on, that on his bellies being often clotted, so that, in technical parlance, it is said to kill the grain.
7The Earl of Pembroke, who presumably knew no better, ordered a violoncello of Banks to be made entirely out of an old cedar-tree which had been blown down in his lordship's park (Wilton). It was, as might have been foreseen, a great failure in tone. Of course Banks made it "right enough," and pocketed the money, but it is doubtful whether the Earl ever got his money's worth.
9I remember a very carefully made violin, all of silver, another expensive freak of ignorance and eccentricity; doubtless it sounded like a tin kettle, and was musically of no use whatever. Some of us may have heard an ingenious itinerant violinist playing on a tin biscuit-box with similar results.
11Benjamin's scrolls are not very elegant, but that does not affect his tone. Benjamin had a very good idea of his own importance, and probably, too, a suspicion of the extent to which his name would be taken in vain after his death. He tried to make this more difficult by not only varying his labels in about four different ways, but also stamping his instruments in several places with his own peculiar seal, B.B.
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