Scan 82
The violin: its famous makers and their imitators, 1909
6 lines. Read by computer on 1 October 2026. Printed page 44. See the scan on archive.org.
1far-removed ancestor, the monochord; and if we compare the Italian peg of the seventeenth century with a modern one, the chief difference lies in the latter being more gross and ugly. Upon turning to the bridge, we see that the bridge of to-day is almost identical with the bridge of Stradivari; and when we come to the strings of the Violin, we discover that we have added but little, if anything, to the store of information regarding them possessed by our forefathers.
3In, perhaps, the earliest book on the Lute, that of Adrian Le Roy, published in Paris in 1570, and translated into English in 1574,1 we read: "I will not omit to give you to understand how to know strings." "It is needful to prove them between the hands in the manner set forth in the figures hereafter pictured, which show on the finger and to the eye the difference from the true with the false." The instructions here given, it will be seen, are those set forth by Louis Spohr in his "Violin School." In the famous musical work of Merseene, published in 1648, we find an interesting account of strings; he says they are of "metal, and the intestines of sheep." "The thicker chords of the great Viols and of Lutes are made of thirty or forty single intestines, and the best are made in Rome and some other cities
51 Fétis, in his notice of Le Roy, states that the first edition of this rare book was published in 1557, and was translated by J. Alford into English in 1568
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