wealthy amateur does not want it; his work is that nightmare of the trade, "a new fiddle." Of violin-making, as of literature, it might be said, in the words of the Irish philosopher, "A man cannot make a living by it until he is dead." For the players who can only afford a moderate price and they constitute the vast majority-the machineshops of Mirecourt and Mittenwald are turning out fiddles by the thousand daily, fiddles excellent in appearance and possible, if not passable, in tone, fiddles which cost the wholesale dealer something in the neighborhood of two dollars in a case, with a bow, a packet of strings, and a box of resin, complete! No comment of mine is necessary. I can only quote the laconic remark of one of the leading European violin-makers with whom I once inspected the manufactory at Mirecourt. When we got outside, I turned to him and said, "Well, what do you think of it?" He raised his hands to heaven and ejaculated, "Damn!" pro Of the absolute conservatism-I might almost say immobility-of the violin, all that I need say is that even the United States has duced no invention in connection with the instrument that has been adopted by any one but the inventor and perhaps a few of his immediate circle of friends; but in all countries of the civilized world innumerable attempts have been made to gild this musical lily, to paint this melodious rose. In the year 1804, Ernst, the celebrated virtuoso and concert-director to the Prince of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, who was also a practical fiddle-maker, wrote as follows: "After the numerous and repeated essays which I have made in the construction of the violin for more than twenty years, I have come to the conclusion that its form and manufacture as they have come down to us from the best Italian masters are not susceptible of any improvement." Notwithstanding this, however, every kind of murderous experiment has been made with a view to improving on the material, form, or detail of the instrument. Violins have been put forward made of earthenware, faïence, and porcelain; violins of copper, brass, and silver; violins of leather, papier-maché, and vulcanite. I once made a collection of these abominable vagaries. I had the trumpet-violin, invented by one named Hell in 1854, the pear-shaped violin of Engleder, Hulskamp's crwth-violin, and innumerable fiddles strung with three, five, and six strings, one with eight, and one with eighteen! I described my entire collection in "Violin-Making as it Was and Is," and my cabinet was for violin-lovers a hideous dream. The only innovations of any note, and which call for more than a passing notice, are the guitar-shaped fiddles of M. Chanot, a French naval officer, and the trapezoid violin of M. Savart, an engineer of like nationality. The former were favorably received by a committee of the Institut de France, appointed to report on their merits, whilst the latter, though hideous to look at, were constructed on sound scientific principles, so much so, indeed, that in the work to which I have referred, I gave the minutest details of their construction, and recommended them to amateur fiddlemakers who are daunted by the dangers and difficulties attendant upon the construction of the true violin in all its perfection of form and detail. VOL. XLIV.—45 Whence comes this perfection? Whence was it evolved? Who can tell? 'Tis true the finding of a dead horse head says the author of an old play called "Lingua," written, they say, by Anthony Brewer in 1607; but this is a dictum, interesting to the bibliophile, inane for the historian. The history of the violin, from the earliest times until comparatively recently, has been found exclusively in pictures and sculptures. Metal and stone instruments may come down to us from the earliest ages, preserved in tombs and monuments, in almost their original state, but the wooden instruments of music, especially those of such delicate build as were made to sustain the tension of musical strings, even had they been intentionally preserved by those whose ears they charmed, must long ere this have succumbed to the ravages of time and its attendant destroyers. For the accuracy of descriptions and representations we can have no vouchers. The artistic imagination is apt to run riot in ornamental details of this kind, and in examining written records we have to allow for transcriptions, translations, and other disguising agencies. The mention of viols in the Bible is an error of translation. The same remark applies to the bow-instruments ascribed to the early Greeks and Romans, and notably to the fiddle of Nero: what was the plectrum exactly, we cannot tell, for no actual specimen of a plectrum has come down to us, though we have reason to believe that it was usually made of some hard material, such as amber or ivory. The earliest bow-instrument of which we have any definite knowledge is the ravanastron, a twostringed instrument in use among the Hindoos from time immemorial, which claims as its inventor one Ravana, who reigned over the island of Ceylon, it is said, three thousand years before Christ. However this may be, it seems probable that the ravanastron is a congener of the ur-heen of China, a similar instrument, of which we have no evidence antedating the introduction of the Buddhist religion into China from India. I have attempted to trace the ancestry of the violin, through this archaic fiddle, to the omerti of modern India and the kemangeh-agouz and the rebab-esh-shaer of the Mohammedan nations. From the rebab and the pear-shaped viols of the East I have progressed to the rebec, the rubebe, the gigue, and the kit of the mediaval West, and thence, by a natural law of causation and development, from the polychord viols of the older makers to the violins of the early Brescian school. I have refused to admit the Welsh crwth-so dear to the antiquarianviolinist-into the pedigree of the fiddle, regarding it, and, I think, correctly, as a mere survival of the classic lyres and barbitons which were played with a plectrum of greater or lesser length. In dismissing this section of the subject it is only fair to say that my theory has been, so to speak, danced upon by Mr. E. J. Payne, a high authority on the fiddle; but I fancy that a majority of those interested therein are inclined to favor my view of the case. What is it, then, this fiddle which is a household word among us? It is a hollow box from thirteen to fourteen inches in length, at the widest part eight and one-half inches and at the narrowest four and one-half inches broad. It is about two and one-half inches deep at the deepest part, and weighs about eight and one-half ounces. Beyond this we have a neck, terminating in a scroll, which, with pegs, fingerboard, and tail-piece of ebony, bring the weight up to about twenty ounces. The wondrous capabilities and equilibrium of all the parts may be summed up in one short sentence: it supports a tension on the strings of sixty-eight, and a vertical pressure on the bridge of twentysix, pounds. This extraordinary instrument, nowhere much thicker than a silver dollar, and generally about as thick as a quarter, fitted together as to its parts without a screw or nail anywhere in its construction, resists a perpetual tension and pressure of ninety-four pounds! A perfect violin is made in seventy parts, each fitting each with an exactitude that almost deceives the most practised eye. The back and the belly are usually made in two pieces each, joined down the centre; they rest on the curved sides, that are made in six pieces, and these are supported by six blocks, at the top, bottom, and four corners. From block to block run twelve slips of pine, which are called linings, and to which, with the sides, the back and belly are glued. Along the interior of the belly, under the fourth string, runs the bass-bar for about six inches, and it is further supported by the sound-post, which is not fixed in any way, but communicates the vibrations of the belly to the back. The dark lines round the outlines of the back and belly are called purflings; they are inlaid in twenty-four pieces, and their mission is not ornamentation, as is generally supposed, but to preserve the delicate edges of the tables from damage. Beyond these we have the button and the tail-piece, with the fastening that connects them, the bridge, the four strings, the finger-board, the nut, the four pegs, and the neck and scroll. The latter are sometimes made in one piece, as also are the back and belly, whilst the purflings are often inlaid in thirty-six pieces instead of twenty-four. Now, every single detail of these parts has to be scientifically and mathematically adjusted; a deviation of a fiftieth part of an inch at any point will destroy the fiddle, probably at once, and certainly as far as the illimitable future is concerned. The thicknesses of the back and belly must be adjusted to the finest possible graduations; the setting of the sound-bar and sound-post (which the French call "the soul" (l'ame) of the fiddle) must be regulated with the extremest nicety, as must also the arching of the tables, the cutting of the ff holes, and the height of the bridge. A single mistake at any of these points, and the violin is a hideous, squeaking instrument of torture. It is, consequently, not surprising that to those who have given themselves the trouble to inform their minds on the subject of their instruments the violin is a neverfailing source of joy, of interest, and of fascination; and it is to such that I address and dedicate these insufficient remarks, since it is not permitted to the musical antiquary to invoke Tom Moore's historic blessing on the head of "the man who hit upon the extremely original notion of sawing the intestines of a cat with the tail of a horse!" Edward Heron-Allen. WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. HAT the lives of men of letters are not, as a rule, generally interesting, is evident, I think, from the small number of good literary biographies which we possess, and which may almost be counted on the fingers of one hand. I refer, of course, to British men of letters, and have in mind such books as Boswell's Johnson, Lockhart's Scott, Moore's Byron, and any good life of Burns, that of Robert Chambers being, I suppose, as good as any. The charm of books like these, however, is not purely literary; for while we respect, admire, and love the literature of the two Scotchmen whom I have named, one the world's greatest song-writer, the other the world's greatest novelist, and respect, admire, and love the literature of the two Englishmen, one the greatest intellectual force in poetry since Marlowe, the other the greatest laborer in many fields of dogmatic thought, the interest which attaches to them is largely a personal one, partly resulting from their unique individuality of character, and partly from the circumstances by which they were surrounded, and which hastened the taking off of the peasant and the peer before they were thirty-seven. Other than literary elements made the career of these men memorable, while others who are equally famous impressed the world less vividly, either because the current of their lives flowed in smoother channels, or because it lapsed away unseen. Professor Knight has recently published a memoir of Wordsworth in three bulky volumes which I have not seen, and which I do not particularly care to see, remembering as I do the two bulky volumes which the brother of the poet published a few years after his death. There was nothing in the career of Wordsworth that demanded these volumes; the incidents of his life were not numerous enough, nor important enough, to justify them, and they were not justified by his verse, concerning which the opinions and the suffrages of readers are not yet at one. But, think what we will of this verse, and I for one think highly of the best of it, I find little to admire, and nothing to respect, in the character of Wordsworth, which was an exceedingly narrow one, which was devoted to worshipping itself, which was detractive of the work of others, and was more egotistical than even that of Dr. Johnson. The man was a curious and disagreeable foil to the poet. I have lately read the memoir of another poet, an American,-who possessed many of the higher intellectual qualities of his English contemporary, and while the incidents of his life were not numerous nor important, they have for several reasons interested me greatly. He was a majestic figure in our letters,— none more majestic, in my opinion: his influence upon our poetry was as great as that of Wordsworth upon English poetry, while his character, his individuality, his habit of mind, which was cast in the Puritan mould, was incapable of egotism and vanity. No poet ever respected his manhood more than he. I need hardly say that the biography of which I am speaking was published by Mr. Parke Godwin in 1883, and that its subject is William Cullen Bryant. The character and work of Mr. Bryant were so strongly marked by what may be called his ancestry and early surroundings, and so closely interwoven with the literary and political history of his country, that they cannot be clearly understood without a greater degree of knowledge in regard to these shaping circumstances than is likely to be possessed by the majority of his readers, even by those who knew him personally, an honor which I enjoyed during the last twenty years of his life. How well I knew him, or how well any one who was some thirty years his junior could know him, are questions which I am not able to solve. Unfitted, as I have to confess myself, by a temperament which in no respect corresponded with his calmer and graver personality, I have, nevertheless, the qualification of understanding the strict, stern, hard life which was his inheritance, and the peculiar race that moulded it and him. Only an American born in the same region of country as he, and under the same domestic and moral conditions, can have the clue to his nature. The State which gave him birth had not changed much from what it was when I had the infelicity to open my childish eyes therein, though it was somewhat modified by a denser population; nor had its men and women changed much, though they, too, were somewhat modified, in that there was less rusticity among them, more liberality of thought, and (possibly) a little more education. Puritan, at least in rural neighborhoods, Massachusetts remained Puritan long after I was born. Mr. Godwin traces the ancestry of Mr. Bryant on the paternal and the maternal side, and Mr. Bryant himself not long before his death began what would have been if it had been finished one of the most charming autobiographies in the language. As I am not skilled in genealogical lore, I must content myself with saying that one of his forbears came over in the Mayflower, and that another was connected by marriage with the stout old Puritan John Alden,-a strain of blood than which there was none higher in New England, rivalling, if not surpassing, the royal strains of Bourbon, Braganza, or Hapsburg. The early settlers of Massachusetts Bay were not, in my way of thinking, an agreeable sort of people to know,-certainly not so agreeable as some of the roysterers who made high jinks with Morton at Merry Mount. They were not satisfied to be virtuous themselves, but they must needs prohibit cakes and ale to others. Deficient in the amenities of life, which in some races are so delightful, they were not deficient in the qualities which go to the making of men and women,—the sturdy stuff which was knit into the fibres of the English sailors who captured the heavily-laden galleons of Philip in the Spanish Main, and scattered the great ships of his Armada in sight of their own stormy coast. The strong sinews of this English race which impelled it to destroy the power of Papacy abroad impelled it to deny the power of Episcopacy at home. Readers of the Hebraic Scriptures in the crude but powerful versions thereof with which since the time of Wyclyf they had been familiar, they were Hebraic in their theology, which was that of the Old rather than that of the New Testament, and, like their Jewish |