Books › Old violins and violin lore, 1900 › scan 138
Scan 138
Old violins and violin lore, 1900
6 lines. Read by computer on 28 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1VIOLINS IN ENGLAND
3as a thing of beauty, wonder, mystery, more than enough to monopolise a lifetime of devotion—this is what made Mr. Ebsworth Hill the spiritual heir of the grand old fiddle-makers. "Why," he said to me once, "talk about not knowing the touch of this or that maker? I know the sort of tools Stradivari or Joseph used. I can see the mark of a special favourite knife here or gouge there. I know which way he used to cut and slice, and how he held his tool for such and such a kind of finish. I can see 'em at work, and the handling of one is no more like another's than the touch of one painter is like another's."
5When you took a fiddle in to show Mr. Hill, you had to wait Mr. Hill's good time; he seldom answered immediately he was spoken to, but would look up dreamily through his spectacles without laying down his file or knife, and let off some such dogmatic and oracular sentence as: "You want to know how I can tell a fiddle. Well, I don't know how I can tell; and there are days when I don't trust my judgment—days I can't see, for instance. I leave off looking at fiddles for a day or two; and when I come back I take up this fiddle and that, and just at first I can't see anything—those fiddles tell me nothing; it's a peculiar state of mind—just as a player or a surgeon's hand gets out, so a judge's eye gets out. I know exactly when I see and when I can't see, and when I can't see I hold my tongue; and I know exactly how much I can see, but I don't tell everybody." The casual visitor could make very little of old Hill at first. There
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