IT is claimed for this book, intended to illustrate rare historical and beautiful Musical Instruments, that it is unique. Classical, MediÆval, Japanese, and other varieties of Decorative Art, Weapons, and Costumes, have found worthy illustration and adequate description, but hitherto no attempt has been made to represent in a like manner the grace and external charm of fine lutes and harps, of viols, virginals, and other instruments. Engravings have been produced, in historical or technical works; but the greater number of these are mere repetitions continued from one to the other, and have no specially Æsthetic interest. Beauty of form and fitness of decoration demand more than the commonplace homage paid to simple use, and while we should never lose sight of the purpose of a musical instrument, its capacity to produce agreeable and various sounds, we can take advantage of its form and material, and, making it lovely to look upon, give pleasure to the eye as well as the ear. It is hardly necessary to say that the love of adornment or ornament is an attribute of the human race. It is to be found everywhere and in every epoch when life is, for the time being, safe and the means of existence secure. Some favourite manner of decoration is the characteristic stamp of a people, a period, or a country. The earliest monuments we can point to that represent musical instruments, show a tendency to adorn them or to place them with decorative surroundings. The Egyptians, the Assyrians, the ancient Greeks supply a record that has been continued by the Persians and Saracens, in the Gothic age and the Renaissance, always repeating, as it were, in an ineffaceable script, the precept that the hand should minister to the gratification of the eye, and satisfy it by alternating excitement with repose. And so it was, until the marvellous mechanical advance in the present century has not only caused us to forget, by its overwhelming power, what our predecessors so steadfastly continued, but has induced us to regard the ugly as sufficient if the mere practical end is served. By thus chilling the appreciation and pursuit of decorative invention, that faculty has been numbed for the time being, and there is danger of its being lost altogether. It may be answered that real artistic work is occasionally done, and there are examples of it to be found in musical instruments; a good organ case is sometimes made, sometimes a fine decoration for a piano case. If there is any hope of an awakening of the love for musical instruments that finds expression in their adornment, its promise lies in the beautiful designs that have been, of late years, so meritoriously carried out for pianos—the invention of Mr. Alma Tadema, Mr. Burne Jones, Mr. Fox, and Miss Kate Faulkner. Good decoration need not be a privilege of the rich; the old Antwerp clavecin-makers, who were all members of the guild of St. Luke, the artists' guild, knew how to worthily decorate their instruments at little cost, as may be seen in the Ruckers Virginal, Plate XVIII. They painted their sound-boards with appropriate ornamentation, and used bright colour to heighten the effect of their instruments when open. The Italians went even farther in richer details, and beautified other stringed instruments besides those with key-boards. The persistence of noble traditions is shown in the exquisite ornament of the Siamese instruments (Plates XLII. and XLIII.) and of the Japanese Koto (Plate XLVI.). It would be grievous if this Eastern inheritance were lost through the engrafting of Western ideas and reception of our material civilisation. The incentive to all such work is the pleasure found in it, and without pleasure in work the life of the worker is aimless and sad.

In describing musical instruments we can refer to no beginnings; those that may be discerned dimly in the glimmering of the historic dawn present a certain completeness that marks an intellectual advance already accomplished. The well-known Egyptian Nefer, a spade-like guitar, or rather tamboura, invited by its long neck the stopping of various notes upon its strings. As early as the Third Dynasty, it had already been so long in use as to have become incorporated in the pictorial language of the Hieroglyphics, in which its representation presented the concept or symbol of the attribute good. This stringed instrument, thus complex in its playing, must have been already grey with age when it was cut in stone in the monument of the beautiful Princess Nefer-t, now in the museum at Bulaq. We cannot conjecture when it was discovered that more tones than one could be got from a single string by taking advantage of the expedient of a long neck or finger-board, or from a single pipe by boring lateral holes in it, and closing those holes to produce different notes with the fingers. Even these remote inventions, certainly prehistoric, seem to require that there should be yet older inventions—those which placed pipes or strings of different lengths, or strings of the same length but of different thicknesses and tension, side by side, as in the syrinx or Pan's pipes, or the harp and lyre.

The late Carl Engel, Music of the Most Ancient Nations (London, 1864), has formed a kind of Development theory for musical instruments, giving the earliest place to the drum, and the latest to the stringed instruments; those of the latter with key-boards having been invented almost in our own time. This theory has lately been reconstructed upon a more scientific basis by Mr. Rowbotham (History of Music, vol. i., London, 1885). The drum and tambourine, and other clashing and mere time-marking instruments, as sistrums, cymbals, castagnettes, and triangles, are on the limit of musical sound and noise, inclining, for the most part, to the latter. The drum is widely used in religious services in different parts of the world, and to play the sistrum was in ancient Egypt the prerogative of a high order of priesthood. The various Buddhist gongs resemble the kettledrums in this respect, that they have a more definable musical element in them, and we find these sonorous metal instruments widely used in China and the Indo-Chinese countries, in Java, and the Indian Archipelago. The Indian drums (Plate XLI.), according to the theory just mentioned, should be aboriginal, but the most ancient, the M'ridang, is attributed to the god S'iva, and is therefore Aryan. Her Majesty the Queen's State Kettledrum (Plate XXXV.) here adorned with a richly embroidered silk banneret, serves to show the highest point the drum has yet attained in estimation and use. On a much higher level is that arrangement of wooden or metal bars in those instruments classed generally as Harmonicons, which are especially at home in Java, Siam, and Burma, and are known to be used from the Hill country of India in the one direction, to Africa in the other. The beautiful Siamese Ranat and Khong (Plate XLIII.) and the Zulu Marimba (Plate XLVIII.) are examples of this wide distribution, and in the latter the gourd resonators attached to the bars show the simplest form of sound reinforcers, which, perfected in various Eastern instruments, such as the Indian VÍnas and SitÁrs (Plate XL.) has in Europe attained its crowning artistic development in the beautiful pear-shaped Resonance bodies of the Lute and Mandoline. We find also varieties of this beautiful form in the Georgian and Turcoman tambouras, the Colascione of Southern Italy and similar instruments, the migrations of which may here and there be traced along the lines of religious movements, as in Central Asia and Hindostan, in China, the Corea, and Japan. For instance, the shorter-necked lutes and guitars, the rebec, rebab, and other precursors of the viols and violins, which, borrowed from the Arabic population of the Holy Land, actually came to Europe upon the reflex wave of the Crusades. The Saracenic occupation of Spain had, however, its share in the transmission of these instruments, and of a taste for the pizzicato, and also of an elaboration of vocal and instrumental ornament, which has remained in the popular airs and dances of that country, and, an important characteristic of the music of the Troubadours and TrouvÈres, has left its mark upon our modern music everywhere. The Arab blood in Spain may have tended to preserve the use of the guitar as a national instrument in that country. A Guitar (Plate XXIX.) and a Cetera (Plate XXVIII.) made by Stradivarius, as he usually signed his name, are of especial interest as showing that he was not above making more simple instruments than violins. The beautiful tortoiseshell Guitar (Plate X.) has a tradition that connects it with Mary of Scots and the unfortunate Rizzio. In all these guitar and lute instruments, the roses in the sound-boards show a wealth of invention in design that is truly astonishing. A work of this kind would not be without interest if it were devoted only to these roses, and to those of spinets and harpsichords. Guitars have flat backs, and lutes shell or pear-shaped resonance bodies, and the former are again divided into the guitar proper with catgut strings, and cithers with wire strings necessitating the employment of a plectrum. The Cetera is the Italian name of the cither, and the one drawn in Plate XIV. is of remarkable, although not unusual, beauty. The cither to which the name of Queen Elizabeth is traditionally attached, belongs to the English family of the Pandore, Orpheoreon, and Penorcon; it is not exactly one of these instruments, but it most nearly resembles the last named. As a fine specimen of English work, in no way ceding to the Italian, this beautiful instrument, commonly known as Queen Elizabeth's Lute (Plate IX.), cannot be too highly extolled. The description accompanying this drawing, and in fact the descriptions of all the drawings, must be referred to for those special particulars that are more conveniently given separately. The Lute (Plate XV.) is one of the finest existing examples of its kind. It bears the label of Vvendelio Venere, Padua, dated 1600, and marks the culmination of that once most favourite instrument. The large bass lutes—the theorboes and chitarroni—that came into use about that date, were rendered necessary through the weakness in the bass of the contemporary harpsichord, which was insufficient as a sub-structure for the Continuo, or Thorough Bass, intended to accompany the Recitativo, then recently introduced at Florence, and forming an essential part of that Monody that was the latest blooming of the Renaissance, as applied to the latest art, harmonised music. The Venetian Theorboes (or Tiorbe) and Chitarroni (Plates XVI. and XXI.) are of great beauty and historical interest. But the lute, even when diapasons or extra bass strings were added to it, went out, being superseded by the more useful, although less beautifully toned, spinet. The latest lute instruments are the pleasing Mandolines to which fashion may possibly grant a new lease of popularity. These instruments are drawn in Plate XXIII. Both ear and eye are equally gratified in that culmination of qualities attained in a violin, in which the sound and shape are so intimately and inseparably connected that we fail to conceive the one without some mental reference to the other. The form and colour of a fine violin are in themselves so beautiful that it seems scarcely possible to enhance their effect by adding any kind of decoration, but in Plate XXV. it will be seen that Antonio Stradivari, with whom the instrument reached perfection, has successfully inlaid one of his masterpieces with an appropriate design. Another violin by the same illustrious master, in this instance without adornment, is drawn in Plate XXVI. The particular characteristics of another famous Cremona maker, Giuseppe Guarneri, who signed himself "Del GesÙ," and is accounted Stradivari's only rival, are also illustrated in this plate. With forty-eight plates, however, to which this work is limited, no complete scheme can be offered of the rich varieties of musical instruments that exist, but the pictorially interesting Viola d'Amore (Plate XXVII.) and the Viola da Gamba (Plate XIX.) have not been overlooked.

Wind instruments, although they may be of earlier invention in their rudimentary forms than those with strings, as in the old-world fable of Apollo and Marsyas, are always placed second. But they have an equal interest intrinsically and historically, and like drums and gongs, have an especial connection with the sacred rites of various nations. The Jewish Shophar, a simple ram's horn, a woodcut of which, drawn from an interesting example preserved at the great Synagogue, Aldgate, London, figures at the end of this Introduction, is the oldest wind instrument in present use in the world. It is first named in the Bible as sounding when the Lord descended upon Mount Sinai, and there seems to be little doubt that it has been continuously used in the Mosaic Service from the time it was established until now. It is sounded in the synagogues at the New Year and on the Fast of the Day of Atonement. The Talmud gives ten reasons for sounding the Shophar at the New Year, which may be summed up as reminding those who hear it of the Creation, Penitence, and the Law, of the Prophets, who were as watchmen blowing trumpets, of the Temple and the Binding of Isaac, of Humility, the gathering together of Israel, the Resurrection, and the day of Judgment, when the trumpet shall sound for all. The embouchure of the Shophar is very difficult, and but three proper tones are usually obtained from it, although in some instances higher notes can be got. The short rhythmic flourishes are common, with unimportant differences, to both the German and Portuguese Jews, and consequently date from before their separation. These flourishes as used in the Ritual are the Tekiah (T'qia?h) music Shebarim (Sh'bharim) music and Teruah (T'rua?h) music usually a tongued vibrato of the lower note. The Gedolah music is the great Tekiah concluding the flourishes. The shophar is usually a ram's horn flattened by heat, the bore being a cylindrical tube of very small calibre, which opens into a kind of bell of parabolic form. The notes here given are those usually produced, but from the empirical formation of the embouchure and a peculiarity of the player's lips, an octave is occasionally produced instead of the normal fifth. The fundamental, if obtained, is not regarded as a true shophar note. Through the mediation of a friend, whose assistance has enabled me to gather this information, I have heard the shophar flourishes played by a competent performer, and am enabled to give an authoritative notation of these strangely interesting historical phrases, for the final correction of which I have to thank the Rev. Francis Cohen.

Bronze horns are also of very ancient use, and existing specimens, chiefly of Celtic or Scandinavian origin, are frequently richly ornamented. Their employment appears to have been for war, for hunting, and the feast. In more recent times, their possession has been attached to feudal customs, as the transfer and holding of land, and at last through the growth of large cities they became associated, as the interesting Dover and Canterbury Horns (Plate I.) were, with municipal customs. Horns were sounded for the curfew, and an especially characteristic example of such horn-blowing is a dramatic feature introduced by Wagner at the close of the second act of his Shakespearean Music Drama, Die Meistersinger von NÜrnberg. Earl Spencer's very beautiful ivory horn or Oliphant (Plate VII.) was most likely intended for the chase. Of other simple wind instruments depending upon the player's lips, the ancient Roman Lituus and Buccina (Plate XXXVII.) are eminently interesting examples. The Roman horse-soldier bore the Lituus, so called from its resemblance to an Augur's staff, and the foot-soldier, the Tuba and circular Buccina. They marched to the sound of instruments, the tones of which were produced exactly as they are in the trumpet and bugle we are familiar with—from the vibration of the lips, varying with the pressure and force of wind within a cup-like mouthpiece. These tones, being from natural harmonics, are not different now from what they were when CÆsar first landed in Britain, or, indeed, the first notes from a horn that were ever produced. Of modern brass instruments drawn, there are two possessing historical interest—the Cavalry Bugle in Plate XXXVI. which belongs to H.R.H. the Prince of Wales, and sounded the moonlight charge of the Household Cavalry at Kassassin in Egypt, and a trumpet that sounded the famous charge at Salamanca. By way of contrast there is the silver State Trumpet (Plate XXXV.), one of ten that were employed in peaceful service for Her Majesty Queen Victoria during her long and gracious rule.

The Syrinx, or Pan's pipes, has been already referred to, and may be described as composed of a certain number of flute-pipes, the sounds being produced by directing the breath against the sharp edge of each pipe. Plato considered the use of the Syrinx lawful in rural life, but he condemned the more richly-toned flute. The shepherd's pipe belongs to the Oboe family, inasmuch as it is sounded by means of a reed, an artifice of great antiquity. We do not know anything about its early development, but Chaldean shepherds played upon similar instruments nearly 2000 years ago, while watching their flocks by night, and Neapolitan peasants still play, in memory of those shepherds, upon similar rustic reed pipes, the Zampogna or Cennamella, for nine days preceding the great Church festivals of the Madonna Immaculata and the Nativity. These primitive oboes must be of very great antiquity. It is probable, the shepherd's pipe was at first a smaller reed inserted in a larger one, or the larger one was slit for a reed vibrator, as boys cut them now. The lowland Scotch shepherd's pipe is made of horn, the cover for the reed being also horn. The principle of a reservoir of air to furnish a supply for pipes, the primitive conception of the organ, was known to the Romans and the original form of bagpipe was the Tibia Utricularis. In course of time no instrument was more popular throughout Europe than the bagpipe. Varieties of it (Plates IV. and V.), including specimens of the Cornemuse and Musette, show the modern forms of this now despised instrument. The principle of the drone-bass, common to the Bagpipe and Hurdy-gurdy (Plate XXX.), must have been of universal acceptance in Europe before the knowledge of counterpoint became general. The peculiar scale of intervals of the great Highland bagpipe adds much to what is characteristic in the tones of the instrument. Its divergence of intonation may be due to the incompetency of the instrument-maker to determine the true distances for boring the lateral holes. If so, we must be lenient with him, for even now, with our perfection of mechanical appliances, the boring is not above question. But, of course, accuracy is more nearly attained than it has been at any previous time, even the earlier years of the present century. Another and a more attractive hypothesis for the Highland bagpipe scale, derives its mean or neuter thirds, neither major nor minor, from a Syrian scale, still found at Damascus, and attributes its presence in Europe to the pipes having been brought, like rebecs, rebabs, and lutes, by returning Crusaders, whose wondering admiration for Saracenic Art is well known. It seems scarcely likely that the music would not also have touched them, possessed as it was of a special charm due to ages of Persian and Arabic cultivation. There is abundant evidence in the present day as to the favour shown in the East for those indefinite thirds, which may originate from an ideally equal scale of seven intervals of the same extent, such as the Siamese accept, instead of five of larger and two of smaller, such as obtains with us; or they may be due to an alteration in tuning the lute, attributed by the Arabian philosopher Al Farabi to a lutenist named Zalzal, who changed one of the frets of the lute to obtain it. It is not necessary to do more than refer to the peculiarities of these Eastern divisions of the scale or the possible survival of one in the Highland bagpipe; the inquirer will find information carried to the limits of our present knowledge in Recherches sur l'Histoire de la Gamme Arabe, par J.P.N. Land (Leyden, 1884), and On the Musical Scales of Various Nations, by Alexander J. Ellis, a paper read before the London Society of Arts, and published in that Society's Journal, 27th March, 1885. It is sufficient to add that while the neuter third remains a favourite interval in some Eastern countries, as far as investigation has been possible it is known in Europe only among the mountains and in the bagpipe music of the Scottish Gael. The latest development of flute and reed pipes is to be found in the flute, oboe, clarinet, and bassoon of the modern orchestra. Plates XXXVIII. and XXXIX. represent instruments that have been the immediate precursors of or are identical with the instruments named. One, the Dolciano or Tenoroon with a clarinet reed, is of unusual importance as possibly anticipating the invention of the Saxophone. It would require a volume to describe the transformations wind instruments have undergone in the present century, particularly that of the Flute by the late Theobald Boehm. The clarinet and oboe have been less altered because the completely refashioned instruments that have been intended to replace them, the saxophone and the sarrusophone, have not retained those special qualities of tone colour required for the palette of the orchestral composer. But for the brass instruments there has been as yet no halting-place. Furnished early in this century with keys, that important revolution was succeeded by another no less complete—the introduction of the valve or piston system, the gain of which, now almost universally acknowledged, has been largely taken advantage of by Wagner and other recent composers.

The familiar Organ is shown in the Positive and Portable organs (l'orgue positif et portatif), small instruments representing reduced front portions of the Montre, the visible speaking pipes of the mediÆval church organ, which was neither more nor less than a large mixture register; that is to say, each key when put down sounded the octave, twelfth, super-octave, and other notes simultaneously with the fundamental note. The movement of the Plain Song, or of any melody with this harmonic structure upon it, was in progressions that no modern musically trained ear could tolerate. Not more than one key of the large church organ could, however, be put down by either hand, as the keys were as broad as the palm, and to press one down required an attack with the player's fist. But the keys of the Portable organ, a processional instrument, were narrow—one hand manipulating the bellows while the player touched the keys with the other. The positive was a chapel or chamber organ, intended to be stationary, and also with narrow keys, admitting of the grasp of an octave. The key-board shown in the Van Eyck St. Cecilia panel of the famous altar-piece at Ghent—the Adoration of the Lamb—has already the complete arrangement of chromatic keys, exactly as in our modern key-board instruments. The date of this panel could not have been later than A.D. 1426. Among the numerous portable organs depicted in paintings of earlier date, the addition of the ficti, as the chromatic notes were called, excepting perhaps the B flat, or the B flat and E flat, does not appear. The B flat, however, was not a chromatic, but an essential note in the ecclesiastical scale. Another early instance in a painting by Hans Memling, preserved in the Hospital of St. John at Bruges, is subsequent in date to the Ghent altar-piece, but is still within the fifteenth century. The chromatic keys are here put farther back than in our usual key-boards, as they were also in the fourteenth-century Halberstadt organ. The fourteenth-century portable organ drawn in Critical and Bibliographical Notes on Early Spanish Music, by Don Juan F. RiaÑo (Quaritch, London), 1887, p. 127, shows the B flat only, and figured as an upper key, apparently not raised, but level with the natural keys, which agrees with contemporary representations of the instrument by Fra Angelico. The Portable Organ (Plate XIII.) here drawn is of comparatively late date, these small instruments having remained in use until after the Reformation. The Positive Organ (Plate XI.) is of earlier date, and is so far developed as to have registers and drawstops to govern them; in this example they are an octave apart, but an unimpeachable authority, Praetorius, speaks of a register in a positive organ a fifth from the fundamental one! Our ancestors were evidently not affected by a progression of fifths as we are.

The Regal (Plate XII., and as Bible Regal, Plate XIII.), was equally a part of the old church organ taken out and played by itself. It is the beating-reed register, so called because the reed overlaps its frame, and when vibrating produces a more or less jarring or strident quality of tone. As the free reed does not touch its frame it is less harsh in quality. But the latter variety of reed is of very recent introduction into Europe. Strangely enough, it has been taken from a Chinese mouth organ of great antiquity, the ShÊng! This Chinese instrument has seventeen sounding pipes, each furnished with a small brass or copper free reed, and is usually sounded by drawing in the wind, not blowing, being in this respect followed by the present American organ. The adoption in Europe of the principle of the ShÊng was due to an application of it at St. Petersburg by an organ-builder named Kirsnick, about 1780, and the enthusiastic advocacy of the AbbÉ Vogler. (Sir George Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Art. "Vogler," by the Rev. J.H. Mee.) From it are derived our accordion and concertinas, harmonium and American organ, as well as sundry musical toys. The ShÊng is drawn in Plate XLIV. It is familiar in Japan, with some variation, as the Sho, and a larger instrument on the same principle used in the Lao States of Siam is there called Phan. In nearly all instances it is retained as a solo instrument. The Siamese musicians, whom H.M. the King of Siam very generously sent at his own expense to the London Inventions Exhibition, and who performed there, in the music room and in the Royal Albert Hall, had among them a Phan player, who always played alone.

Harp-like instruments, but with resonance bodies beneath the strings, appear in their oldest, but a yet highly developed form, in the Chinese Ch'in, or Scholar's Lute. The Japanese Sono Koto (Plate XLVI.) is derived from a modification of the Ch'in, known in China as the SÊ, the difference being that while the Ch'in has fixed bridges and a system of stopping, the SÊ, and consequently the Koto, have movable bridges and no stops. The Koto is tuned according to the five notes in the octave system that prevails in Japan and, with a difference in the division of the scale, in China, named, by the late Carl Engel, pentatonic. The player kneels upon the ground beside the instrument, and resting or sitting upon his heels, touches the shorter lengths of the strings, as divided by the bridges, with plectra on the thumb and first two fingers, but, at the same time, makes constant use of the longer lengths to press upon or relieve the strings so as to alter the tension and produce intermediate tones. The Koto drawn is one of great beauty. The four characteristic popular instruments of Japan are the Koto, the Siamisen, the Biwa, and the Kokiu (see Plates XLVI. and XLVII.) The Siamisen is allied to the Chinese San-hsien and the Biwa to the Chinese P'i-p'a (see Plate XLIV.). The very curious Siamese Ta'khay, or crocodile (Plate XLIII.), is of the same genus as the Koto and Ch'in, but has been changed into its present form by Siamese ingenuity, which has found a rich field for employment in the decoration of musical instruments, the Siamese, in this respect, bearing the palm in the East, as the Italians have done in the West.

As to the principle of the harp or rather of the psaltery embodied in these parallel strung instruments, it differs from the Egyptian and Assyrian conceptions, which placed the resonance bodies of their harps in a curved disposition, the one below, the other above the strings. Greek lyres had their sound bodies directly underneath the strings. The origin of the Greek lyre is unknown, the name not being Hellenic; it may possibly have been Asiatic, but was not originally Egyptian. It would solve an interesting problem could we know what was the Hebrew kinnor, the harp of the Authorised Version, the most prominent stringed instrument occurring in the richest collection of sacred poetry the world has known, the Hebrew Psalms. Dr. Stainer, who has made a complete analysis of the text, has not got beyond conjecture. It is only certain that the kinnor was a stringed instrument. It is recorded that it was made by Tubal Cain, played upon by Laban the Syrian and by the shepherd boy David. It is mentioned in the Book of Job, and the captive Hebrews in Babylon hung their kinnors on the trees. Whether with or without finger-board, whether a lyre, a trigonon, or a harp, its tones had power over the feelings to produce similar effects to those with which music touches us now, as surely as that the physical law of sympathetic vibration was as active then in Syria, or by the waters of Babylon, as it is to-day in Edinburgh or London.

The forms of Harp drawn in this work (Plates II., III., and XXXIV.) differ from the ancient harps which had no forearm or front pillar, and could therefore have endured but little strain. Yet an old Celtic monument represents a harp-like instrument with this Eastern peculiarity. The extremely interesting Celtic harps here drawn, the Queen Mary and the Lamont harps, have forearms or bows of a constructive strength that would, with the rest of the framing, bear a considerable draught of wire. The Celts and Germanic nations appear to have long cultivated the harp. The word itself is German, but the Celtic people of these islands have different names for it, according to whether they are of the Gaelic or Cymric branch. The common Gaelic name was Cruit (Crot), which comes from a root meaning vibration, but this name has been superseded by Clarsach, which is derived from the resounding board. The Welsh name, Telyn, implies strain or tension. It must be remembered that the triple-strung Welsh Harp is a comparatively modern instrument, and so also is the Welsh Crwth (Plate XXIV.), in the only form in which it has come down to us, as a bowed instrument with extra strings off the finger-board, a peculiarity belonging to the theorbo and lyra-viol. The origin of the Crwth would appear to have been the classical lyre submitted to changes that had come with time, and, as the Continental Rote or Rotta, it was a very common form of instrument in the Middle Ages. It had to give way before Eastern stringed instruments, such as the rebec and lute. The VÍna (Plate XL.) is the characteristic Hindu stringed instrument, and has a great antiquity attributed to it. The string is theoretically said to be divided into twenty-two small intervals in the octave, of equal extent, called s'ruti, by which the tones and semitones are determined; but recent observation shows that the Hindus are satisfied with a division of twelve semitones in the octave—in fact, our chromatic scale. Smaller intervals are only used for grace notes, and are produced by deflecting the string. Gourd resonators have been mentioned as of probably very ancient use, and the employment of sympathetic strings, in vogue in Europe only in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, may be added as also of remote origin in India. The Hindus and Persians have both used gourds attached to the VÍnas and SitÁrs (Plate XL.) for resonance. In Southern India, where the use of the original Hindu VÍna prevails, although the scale now used is at least heptatonic, there is still a leaning towards pentatonic forms of melody. The accordances are in fourths or fifths and octaves. The SitÁr of Northern India and greater use of the interval of the third may be attributed to Persian introduction; but throughout India, and more intensely in the south, music is felt as a poetic art, and has a development in its own way, that still remains unrecognised in Europe, although we now have scholars from whose researches and zeal this ignorance may be in time, at least partially, dispelled. Music is acutely felt as a means of expression in India unknown in China or among the Indo-Chinese races.

The vexed question of the introduction of the bow to stringed instruments, upon which the most eminent authorities are not yet disposed to agree, is one that needs only to be mentioned here. Whether of Asiatic or European introduction, it would appear at first to have been only one of the ways by which sounds could be drawn from strings, and that it gradually became victorious over the plectrum, with instruments of the viol kind, which thereby gained a great development. It is even now permitted to use the fingers to a bowed instrument in the pizzicato of the violin and violoncello.

The Psaltery was a plectrum instrument derived from the Arab Qanun; it is rarely absent in paintings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries where musical instruments are represented. The same instrument, increased in the weight of stringing to resist the impact of hammers, is the familiar dulcimer, which, like the hurdy-gurdy and the bagpipe, has seen better days. What was once thought of the dulcimer is shown by the painting that adorns the one drawn in Plate XVII. It seems almost vexatious that we do not know who first adjusted a key-board to a psaltery, and thus constructed a spinet. It was not earlier than the fifteenth century, but the name of the meritorious inventor has not come down to us, or where he lived. It seems most likely from the earliest name, clavicymbalum, being Latin, that the instrument was first contrived in a monastery. But we have, fortunately, in Plate VI., in an upright Spinet or Clavicytherium, one of the earliest existing specimens of the kind. It is a question not yet decided whether this rare instrument is of South German or North Italian origin. The reason is given for the former attribution in the description accompanying the drawing. Yet the Mantegnesque feeling is so strong in the decoration of the interior that we pause before accepting the Swabian origin as conclusively settled.

Queen Elizabeth's Virginal (Plate VIII.), which has at last found a resting-place in the splendid collection of old musical instruments in South Kensington Museum, is not a virginal proper, but apparently an Italian spinet. It has been gloriously decorated, and it awakens an intense feeling of interest to reflect upon who may have played upon it and who may have stood by and heard the pleasing tones of an instrument once so much cared for. The Spinet was at that time beginning to gain upon the Lute. The power to perform part music with two hands, which the lute-player, having only one hand to stop with, could but imperfectly approach, was an endowment there was no gainsaying. We may see the contemporary prosperity of the great Venetian republic in the lutes, theorboes, and spinets that are now dispersed throughout Europe; and almost at the same time such instruments as the Ruckers Virginal (Plate XVIII.) and the Ruckers double Spinet (Plate XX.) bear witness for Antwerp as to the favour successful commerce has ever shown the Arts. The great English spinet-makers belong to the second half of the seventeenth century, and the first quarter of the eighteenth. Among them, Stephen Keene was in the foremost rank, and his work will still bear examination in the spinet drawn in Plate XXII. The eighteenth century was marked by a great advance in making the expressive Clavichord, which although perhaps the oldest key-board stringed instrument, had always had to give way before the louder and more graceful-looking spinet. Plate XXXII. displays the clavichord at its culmination, and the Chinese Lac decoration shows that, in this specimen at least, its intimate charm of tone, capable, as no other key-board instrument was, of the vibrato, was deemed worthy of an elaborate setting.

The latest improvements of which the Spinet genus was capable, including the Venetian Swell, are founded in the Double Harpsichord (Plate XXXIII.) made by Burkat Shudi (Burkhard Tschudi) and John Broadwood in 1773, for the Empress Maria Theresa. It is a question whether some musical instruments of special character should not be retained for use or be made again when that character cannot be expressed by any existing instrument. If this were done the Viola d'Amore, the Viola da Gamba, the Harpsichord, the Clavichord, and the old German flute, in the last instance with some concession to defective intonation, would find their places and be sometimes heard with pleasure.

With regard to the selection and drawing of the subjects represented in the following Plates, it may be mentioned that the present writer had the important advantage of a free use of the remarkable Loan Collection of Musical Instruments exhibited at the Royal Albert Hall, Kensington, in 1885. Extraordinary facilities for drawing the selected subject were obtained through his official connection with the Music Division of the Exhibition, and through the gracious permission of the respective owners of the instruments, including H.M. the Queen, H.R.H. the Prince of Wales, H.R.H. the Siamese Minister, and the Japanese Commission. He has also utilised some sketches of instruments selected and drawn by Mr. Robert Glen of Edinburgh, to whom belongs the credit of originating the idea of this publication.

The pictorial representation of the subjects was undertaken by Mr. William Gibb, and the plates in this volume have been successfully reproduced from his admirable drawings. The book gains, moreover, a special and unexpected value from the fact that no illustrated Catalogue RaisonnÉ was compiled of the Music Loan Collection of 1885, which combined the most beautiful and valuable Manuscripts, Books, Paintings, etc., as well as Musical Instruments, which were ever brought together. There were no funds available, nor was there time to permit of such a work being carried out before the Collection was dispersed. By those who deplore the loss of that opportunity, the illustrations of this work may be regarded as a valuable memento of that unrivalled Collection.

A.J.H.

shophar

JEWISH SHOPHAR.

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