Restoration, gentlemen played three, four and five parts with viols. They esteemed a violin to be an instrument only belonging to a common fiddler, and could not endure that it should come among them for fear of making their meetings vain.” This prejudice against the violin is even felt to-day by many people. We ourselves remember an old lady’s astonishment when we confided to her that we could play the violin: “Why!” she exclaimed, “I thought such instruments were only played outside public-houses.” The degree of excellence attained by such men as the Abbé Maugars, Hoffman, Sainte Colombe, and Marais, on the viola da gamba was certainly detrimental to the development of the violoncello. Maugars spent four years studying the gamba in England in 1620, and when he visited Rome, in 1639, his performances at the house of Signora Leonora Baroni, a famous Italian singer--who was herself no mean performer on the harpsichord and gamba--gained him the highest eulogies, which he recounts with no uncertain voice in the pamphlet already referred to (p. 138). In the face of the prodigies performed by gamba players, makers were content to follow the times and allow the violoncello to retain its large proportions. Even Stradivarius, who made the violin what it now is, did not occupy himself with the dimensions of the violoncello, but adopted the measurements of his contemporaries. A complete account of this maker’s violins and violoncellos is to be found in Messrs Hill’s valuable monograph “Antonio Stradivari, his Life and Work.” In the chapter devoted to a _résumé_ of Stradivari violoncellos, they make the interesting assertion that no violoncello by Stradivarius is known to them previous to the year 1680. The earliest dated instrument of the violoncello type known to them was made by the great Cremona master in his twenty-third year, 1667, and, although it has been considerably altered, it apparently originally contained many of the features of the viola da gamba and violoncello. They are of opinion that the instrument was primarily strung as a gamba, which was doubtless the case, for at that time it was customary to make gambas in two forms--_i.e._ with flat back and true viol-shaped upper bouts curving high into the neck, and also in the violin form. Christopher Simpson, the most renowned English gamba player of his day, gives excellent representations of both these forms of gambas (p. 80) in his “Division Viol” (Second Edition, London, 1667). He recommends the violin shape as superior to the viol form for playing divisions on a ground as “the sound should be quick and sprightly, like a Violin; and Viols of that shape (the Belleys being digged out of the plank) do commonly render such sound.”