It must be allowed that both Gaspard Duiffoproucart and Andrea Amati were fortunate in living at a time when Art, Science, and Literature had taken a new lease of life. The meeting of sixteenth-century modernity with antique culture had created a new atmosphere of learning; in a word, the Renaissance had dawned, and progress had begun its march over Europe. _Il Divino_ Raphaël, Leonardo da Vinci, Savonarola, Galilei, Lassus, were as comets in the horizon of advancement. Petrucci in Venice had invented the art of music printing, and deep in the heart of the Netherlands there had grown up a technically equipped school of musical composers, before which the spontaneous art of the minstrel was compelled to recede. Impelled onward by Guillaume Dufay, Johan Ockenghem, Josquin des Prés, and their successors, to Lassus, the higher culture of the divine art was making rapid progress and consummating the final emancipation of musical instruments. Already, in the early part of the sixteenth century, signs and tokens of the event were observable. In 1511 a native of Strasburg--Sebastian Virdung--compiled a species of miniature Grove’s dictionary devoted to the musical instruments of his time. The work was published in his native town, and was afterwards extensively cribbed by Agricola and Luscinis. The numerous woodcuts with which Virdung’s work is interspersed are of interest, especially when such guileless incongruities as a “Grosse Geigen”--without a bridge--and a “Kleine Geigen” (a rebec) with a bridge present themselves. Ten years after Virdung, Hans Judenkünig was busy penning little pieces for voices and stringed instruments, a style of composition that counted numerous imitators at a later date, both on the Continent and in England. His manuscript--published by good Hans Syngriner in Vienna in 1523--consists of a number of short pieces, songs and dances, with the lute and viol pieces written in tablature. A precious copy of this work is jealously preserved in the Royal Library at Vienna. When one realises that it is easily within human capacity to feast upon its secrets, one cannot help wishing that a “magic carpet” could be requisitioned to take us to the spot where it now lies, at once. Could this be accomplished, and we were suddenly confronted with Judenkünig’s dog-eared elderly tome, our feeble attempts at description would collapse like a Gibus hat. There is something about time-honoured volumes that commands silence.