There can be very little question of there being more than mere admiration for the appearance. Simply viewed, there is the spice of romance in connection with it, the history is written in language more or less intelligible of the knocks and bruises inflicted, unwillingly in most instances, but not invariably so. And here attention may perhaps be appropriately drawn in these pages to what has been asserted by a few, very few, dealers and others, whose general intelligence should have been a guarantee against the dissemination of utter nonsense and which has even been in print! that--just think of this--Antonio Stradivari, the acknowledged master liutaro of Cremona in his own day, and of whose growing fame no one can foretell the limits--actually imitated wear and tear of varnish on his violins. I have not the print at hand, and so cannot give the exact words in which this scum from the boilings of a distorted imagination was conveyed; nor point to the first unfortunate who let it flow abroad. In all probability it came from the same old source, a desire to lift up to a high level worthless imitations of the master, confuse the public mind so as to make it more and more difficult to tell "t'other from which." A fine specimen, and well known, of Stradivari's art was once lying on a table before me. An amateur of considerable attainments and honesty of purpose then present was dilating upon its many beauties and fine preservation; he, I soon found, had by some means become infected with the absurd notion of the varnish having been artistically pecked away by the original maker! Just fancy this--Raphael slitting a hole in his chef-d'oeuvre to make it look old--Michael Angelo chipping some bits from the ceiling of the Sistine just before the scaffolding was removed, or Phidias snapping off a limb and browning the raw surface to please future connoisseurs. They might all have done this with an equal deficiency of reason and consistency if we allow for one moment any possibility of the genius of such a stamp as that of Antonio Stradivari descending to such depravity. Those who have lent themselves to this incongruous notion, hastily generalising from insufficient particulars, have strangely overlooked the fact that the same kind of chipping is seen on the violins of other masters, Joseph Guarnerius, Carlo Bergonzi, and others of the Cremonese and Venetian School, besides--going far back--the older ones of Brescia and Pesaro, any number in fact over all Italy. CHAPTER VI. SOME MODIFICATIONS IN STRADIVARI'S WORKS--VARIATION IN FINISH OF DETAILS--THE INTERIOR OF HIS VIOLINS--THE BLOCKS AND LININGS--THICKNESSES OF THE TABLES--HEADS OR SCROLLS OF HIS DIFFERENT PERIODS.