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Scan 100
The Violin and its Music, 1881
4 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 80. See the scan on archive.org.
1virginals and a Broadwood trichord grand. That there were instruments in very early times having much in common with the Violin is not to be doubted; but I cannot but think it is necessary to keep them apart from the instrument known to us under that name, if confusion is to be in any way avoided. The attachment of different names to one and the same instrument arises chiefly from the uncertainty of the meaning of their nomenclature in English poetry and chronicles. The confusion of titles to bowed instruments which appears among the old writers, has been greatly intensified by the laudable endeavour of the musical historian to reconcile this nomenclature with divers pieces of sculpture and monumental brasses, upon which some rude-shaped bowed instrument has been depicted, without making sufficient allowance for the looseness of description on the part of the poet, and the licence indulged in by the sculptor. There are no instruments in existence to my knowledge of fifteenth century work in England of the bowed kind, therefore all knowledge of them rests on this unstable foundation.
3That a bow was in use in England at a very early date is evident from Saxon Illuminated MSS. in the British Museum, in which musicians are represented playing upon a pear-shaped instrument with sound-holes, resembling a lute, the neck being only sufficiently large to admit of the hand. This instrument appears slightly in advance of one played without a bow, and possibly it was so constructed to be used with or
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