Scan 76
The violin: its famous makers and their imitators, 1884
4 lines. Read by computer on 28 September 2026. Printed page 28. See the scan on archive.org.
1us of the windings of a gentle stream or the twine of tendrils in the trellised vine.
3Often is the question asked, What can there be in a simple Violin to attract so much notice? What is it that causes men to treat this instrument as no other, to view it as an art picture, to dilate upon its form, colour, and date? To the uninitiated such devotion appears to be a species of monomania, and attributable to a desire of singularity. It needs but little to show the inaccuracy of such hypotheses. In the first place, the true study of the Violin is a taste which needs as much cultivation as a taste for poetry or any other art, a due appreciation of which is impossible without such cultivation. Secondly, it needs, equally with these arts, in order to produce proficiency, that spark commonly known as genius, without which cultivation, strictly speaking, is impossible, there being nothing to cultivate. We find that the most ardent admiration for the Violin regarded as a work of art has ever been found to emanate from those who possessed taste for kindred arts. Painters, musicians, and men of refined minds have generally been foremost among the admirers of the Violin. Much interest attaches to it from the fact of its being the sole instrument incapable of improvement, whether in form or in any other material feature. The only difference between the Violin of the sixteenth century and that of the nineteenth lies in the arrangement of the sound-bar (which is now longer, in order to bear the increased pressure caused by the
The computer misreads some letters and numbers. Where a name matters to you, read the scan.