Books › The violin: some account of that leading instrument, and its most eminent professors, from its earliest date to the present time;, 1878 › scan 37
Scan 37
The violin: some account of that leading instrument, and its most eminent professors, from its earliest date to the present time;, 1878
11 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1with distaste from what is modern. "Though the violin surpasses the lute," says a recent ingenius writer, "as much as the musket surpasses the bow and arrow, yet Cupid has not yet learned to wound his votaries with a bullet, nor have our poets begun to write odes or stanzas to their violins."
3In the 39th Queen Elizabeth, a statute was passed by which "Minstrels, wandering abroad," were included among "rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars," and were adjudged to be punished as such. "This act," says Percy, in his Reliques of English Poetry, "seems to have put an end to the profession." That writer suggests, however, that although the character ceased to exist, the appellation might be continued, and applied to fiddlers, or other common musicians; and in this sense, he adds, it is used in an ordinance in the time of Cromwell (1656), wherein it is enacted that if any of the "persons commonly called Fiddlers or Minstrels shall at any time be taken playing, fiddling, and making music in any inn, alehouse, or tavern, or shall be taken proffering themselves, or desiring or intreating any . . . . . . to hear them play or make music in any of the places aforesaid," they are to be "adjudged and declared to be rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars*." By a
5* According to Strutt, the name of fiddlers was applied to the minstrels as early, at least, as the 14th century. "It occurs (says that writer) in the Vision of Pierce the Ploughman, where we read, 'not to fare as a fydeler, or a frier, to seke feastes.' It is also used, but not sarcastically, in the poem of Launfel:—
7They had menstrelles of moche honours,
8Fydelers, sytolyrs, and trompoters.
10"I remember also (says Strutt) a story recorded in a manuscript, written about the reign of Edward III, of a young man of family, who came to a feast, where many of the nobility were pre-
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