Books › Old violins and violin lore, 1900 › scan 136
Scan 136
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
3business. These two clever artificers soon raised Dodd's business to great prosperity, and Dodd thus had the honour of putting his own name in their violins. All he had done, however, was to varnish them, but he did that superlatively well, so that Dodd's varnish became as famous as Dodd's bows.
5Fendt afterwards left Dodd and worked for John Betts, who was famous for his imitations of Amati, which he said paid better than making fiddles with his own name in them. Many of his best imitations were made by Fendt, who has thus created the reputation of two makers besides himself. His son, who died only in 1851, would have equalled his father had he not been seduced by the vicious practice of prematurely ageing his violins, thus pandering to the taste for old fiddles at the expense of the fiddles themselves—for it is notorious that such frauds do not improve by age.
7A VIGNETTE OF W. E. HILL.
9Dark—yes, to my eyes very dark; but the light in William Ebsworth Hill's old shop in Wardour Street was good enough for him; a greater glare might have flouted those hundreds of old brown fiddles, and dusty débris of fiddles, which that very moderately sized establishment was hung, lined, strewn, and littered o'er with.
11So the dim light, relieved on foggy days with a casual gas-jet, or even a candle-end, seemed better than the garish sunlight for that dusky brood—even as the moonbeam, according to Sir Walter Scott, touched the
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