Scan 566
The violin: its famous makers and their imitators, 1909
2 lines. Read by computer on 27 September 2026. Printed page 488. See the scan on archive.org.
1they 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 production 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 accident, bought the lot of splintered fragments for a couple of pounds, and in a fortnight had restored the magnificent Stradivari to its original integrity, and cleared 150 guineas by its sale. But Schnapps is a humbug at bottom—an everlasting copyist and manufacturer of dead masters, Italian, German, and English. He has sold more Amatis in his time than Amati himself ever made. He knows the secret of the old varnish; he has hidden stores of old wood—planks of cherry-tree and mountain-ash centuries old, and worm-eaten sounding-boards of defunct Harpsichords, and reserves of the close-grained pine hoarded for ages. He has a miniature printing press, and a fount of the lean-faced, long-forgotten type, and a stock of the old ribbed paper torn from the fly-leaves of antique folios; and, of course, he has always on hand a collection of
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