Books › Old violins and violin lore, 1900 › scan 218
Scan 218
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.
1VIOLIN DEALERS AND AMATEURS
3turned—it was thought hardly worth a serious inquiry; it "was all to pieces" or "only an old fiddle;" and, indeed, I have before now seen such with the belly off converted into serviceable dustpans.
5Credulity has succeeded to ignorance, and now any one who has any sort of shabby-looking fiddle fancies he has got a rare Cremona!
7He will advertise it unblushingly in the halfpenny papers, bring it gravely to supposed judges, and make a favour of even showing it to a dealer.
9Nothing will shake the confidence of these simple folk in their spurious wares; they will bring out a common brown German dated Maggini, and you point out that Maggini never dated his instruments; they suppose you to be envious. Or they show you a Stainer rashly dated fifty years after that maker's death (such an one was lately brought to me), with a label so recent that you wonder at the brazen fraud. As to the good and tolerably deceptive French copies of Strad, their name is legion, and for a moment a person fairly conversant with fiddles may be deceived by such a subtle and withal honest copyist as Lupôt, but to the eye of the experienced dealer the varnish is quite enough. The varnish that chips off instead of rubbing away, thus leaving the raw wood more exposed than permeated, is not Cremona varnish.
11Of course as to the new labels in modern type I have nothing to say. No one but a complete fool in fiddles could be taken in by them.
13Still, when all gross cases are put aside, there is an
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