Scan 42
The Fiddle Fancier's Guide: A Manual of Information Regarding Violins …, 1892
2 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1am speaking now principally of violins from twenty-five and thirty pounds downward to eight, six, five, four, and even fewer pounds. These sums are freely given for common, old rubbish, such as are really only fit to be broken up when compared with new instruments at similar prices. The reader will observe that I have said ninety out of every hundred—a rough and ready way of indicating the proportion of bad to good instruments. And by "bad" I here mean not intrinsically bad, but bad by comparison with new instruments at equal prices. It is now going on for half a century since I began to take an interest in violins, and few aspects of the subject have caused me more surprise from time to time than the apparently fixed determination of people to have an old fiddle at all hazards. It is not so much that they want a beautiful old violin, or an exquisitely toned old violin, for these distinctions cannot generally be promiscuously secured at such prices as they are willing to give, but they want an old violin, because they consider that its age will be a kind of guarantee of its excellence. Few notions could well be more absurd than this. Age guarantees nothing, except the possibility that there will be a few cracks here and there in the wood of the instrument, a few square inches of varnish rubbed off, a fracture or two in the ribs, a scroll defective on one side, or some such indication of abuse or wear, but age guarantees nothing with regard to excellence of manufacture or quality of tone. If the instrument has originally been a good violin, with a good quality of tone, age and use undoubtedly improve that quality in a manner which no person—scientific or unscientific—has
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