Scan 485
The violin: its famous makers and their imitators, 1875
4 lines. Read by computer on 1 October 2026. Printed page 331. See the scan on archive.org.
1the first judge in Europe; Fiddles travel to him from all parts of the continent for his opinion, bringing their fees with them; and for every instrument he sells, it is likely he pronounces judgment upon a hundred. It is rumoured that the greatest master-pieces in being are in his possession.
3"A dealer of a different stamp is Michael Schnapps, well known in the trade, and the profession too, as a ravenous Fiddle-ogre, who buys and sells everything that bears the Fiddle shape, from a Double-Bass to a dancing-master's pocketable Kit. His house is one vast warehouse, with Fiddles on the walls, Fiddles on the staircases, and Fiddles hanging like stalactites from the ceilings. To him the tyros resort when they first begin to scrape; he will set them up for ten shillings, and swop them up afterwards, step by step, to ten or twenty guineas, and to ten times that amount if they are rich enough and green enough to continue the experiment. Schnapps imports Fiddles in the rough, under the designation of toys; most of which are the productions of his peasant-countrymen bordering on the Black Forest; and with these he supplies the English provinces and the London toy and stationers' shops. He is, further, a master of the Fiddle-making craft himself, and so consummate an adept in repairing, that nothing short of consuming fire can defeat his art. When Pinker, of Norwich, had his Cremona smashed all to atoms in a railway collision, Schnapps rushed down to the scene of the
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