Books › The violin, how to make it, 1880 › scan 15
Scan 15
The violin, how to make it, 1880
10 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 9. See the scan on archive.org.
1board of the viol was fretted for the proper stopping of the strings, as in the guitar, whilst various methods of tuning were adopted, but the most prevalent system in Britain, at least, appears to have been that by Fourths.
3So great was the supremacy of this instrument amongst our ancestors, that for several years after the Violin had been introduced, the Viol always held the preference, until the former became more widely known, and its qualities truly appreciated. The Viol, although a pleasing, was a soft instrument, the sounds possessing little loudness or intensity. For a period of many years after the Violin began to be first introduced, and thus to supplant the Viol, we learn from a contemporary writer the struggles it had to encounter ere it attained priority. In allusion to a concert of various instruments, the author remarks—
5"The scoulding Violins will out-top them all;"
7and whilst he is willing to admit a couple of Violins amongst the other instruments adapted for a "merry-making," he takes the precaution to have also a "a pair of lusty, well-sized theorboes—the reason being that the Violins 'may not outcry the rest of the musick, the basses especially.'"
9Violers, or performers on the Viol, were quite numerous throughout Britain during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and even formed a part of the Royal Household. They wore red bonnets, were clothed in livery, and received a small gratuity. The terms fiddle and fiddler, so frequently mentioned by some of the early authors, sometimes certainly refer to the Viol and Violer as well as to the Violin and Violinist, as those words have been, by many ancient historians and poets, used without any due regard to proper distinction. The Viol was in universal use throughout Scotland in the seventeenth century; but at this period it must not be supposed that the Violin was unknown, as frequent reference is made to it several centuries earlier. From ancient documents we learn that four Violers played at the Cross in Edinburgh on the day of the Coronation of Charles II., 1660; and many more quotations might be cited, verifying the common use of the Viol in Edinburgh and other Scottish towns. In concluding the few preceding remarks upon the Viol, it may not be out of place here to include, also, a species of Viol which ranked as a particular favorite throughout Britain, about the commence-
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