Books › The violin: some account of that leading instrument, and its most eminent professors, from its earliest date to the present time;, 1878 › scan 23
Scan 23
The violin: some account of that leading instrument, and its most eminent professors, from its earliest date to the present time;, 1878
8 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1among the range of statues at the head of the canal at Versailles, an Orpheus is seen (known by the three-headed dog that barks between his legs), to whom the sculptor has given a violin, upon which he appears scraping away with all the furor of a blind itinerant. But is the statue, or its original, an antique? We may rest in safe assurance that it is a modern-antique; as much so, as the ingenious figment of Nero's fiddling a capriccio to the roaring accompaniment of the flames of Rome!
3As for the fidicula of the Romans (or rather, of the Latin Dictionary), it is evidently, as far as it has been made to apply to the fiddle, no legitimate family name. The violin very positively disowns all relationship with it, and leaves it to settle its claims with the guitar.
5As far as the mere name goes, however, it is not impossible that a connection may exist, and that the word-hunting Skinner may be right in deriving the Anglo-Saxon word fithele from the older German vedel, and thence from the Latin fidicula, which, it is hardly necessary to state, was any thing but a fiddle, and therefore "had no business" to lend its appellation in the way here noticed.
7On the whole, as regards the pretensions alleged on the side of the ancients for the honor of having had the violin in existence among them, it may be safely remarked, that, if nothing like the bow, which is obviously connected most essentially with the expression and character of the violin, can be traced to their days, the violin itself, à fortiori, cannot be said to have belonged to them; and all those questionable shapes which have been speculatively put forward as possible fiddles, must be thrown back again into the field of antiquarian conjecture, to await some other appropriation. The follow-
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