Books › The violin: some account of that leading instrument, and its most eminent professors, from its earliest date to the present time;, 1878 › scan 36
Scan 36
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.
1chancel of Dronfield church, in the county of Derby; an edifice which was erected early in the sixteenth century.
3At what period the legitimate violin may have found its way from Italy into this country, it would, I fear, be very difficult to ascertain with exactness; but it is easy to suppose that, when once that event had occurred, the neater shape and superior qualities exhibited by the new comer, would speedily render him the model for imitation, and lead to the multiplication of his species here, and to the displacement of the baser resemblances to him. The true instrument, however, was for a long while among us, ere its merits came into just appreciation. Until the period of the Restoration, it was held, for the most part, in very low esteem, and seldom found in less humble hands than those of fiddlers at fairs, and such like itinerant caterers of melody for the populace*. Its grand attribute, the superior power of expressing almost all that a human voice can produce, except the articulation of words, was at first so utterly unknown, that it was not considered a gentleman's instrument, or worthy of being admitted into "good company." The lute†, the harp, the viol, and theorbo, were in full possession of the public ear, and the poetic pen; nor has this latter authority ever been thoroughly propitiated by the later-born child of Melos, whose first screams on coming into the world may perhaps have irrecoverably alarmed the sensitive sons of Apollo. Moreover, poetry is ever apt to prefer the old to the new, and often recoils
5* "It is a kinde of disparagement to be a cunning fiddler."—Feltham.
7† The lute, of which hardly the shape, and still less the sound, are now known, was, during the 16th and 17th centuries, the favourite chamber instrument of every nation in Europe.
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