Books › The violin and its music, 1881 › scan 25
Scan 25
The violin and its music, 1881
6 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 3. See the scan on archive.org.
1idolatrous sacrifices. These people made no scruple of handling gutts and garbages, and were so free with humane bodys as to make drinking cupps of their sculls. And when the discovery of the vertue of the bow was made, and understood, the vertuosi went to work and model'd the use of it, and its subject the Viol, with great improvement, to all purposes of musick, and brought it to a parallel state with the Organ itself. And by adapting sizes to the severall diapasons as well above E la as the doubles below, severall persons take their parts, and consorts are performed with small trouble, and in all perfection. The invention needs no encomium to recomend it to posterity; for altho' it hath bin in practise many hundred years, no considerable alterations of it in forme or application have bin made which any memoriall can account for. And now no improvement is thought of or desired, but in the choice of the materiall, and curiosity of the workmanship. I shall take leave of the Violl with a remembrance onely of a merry discovery of Kircher's in one of his windy volumes,* which is a note added to the picture of a Lute and a Guittarre, that the old Hebrews used to sound them with the scratch of an horse tail bow."!!
3With this scornful allusion to Kircher's knowledge of the bow, we will close North's Memoires of Musick, staying but to call the reader's attention to what appears to be a singularly correct estimate
5* Musurgia Universalis, 1650.
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