[Illustration: Fig. 178.--Ancient Lyre. (Angers MS.)] [Illustration: Fig. 179.--Lyre of the North. (Ninth Century.)] The lyre was held upon the knees, and the performer touched or rubbed the strings with one hand, either with the fingers or by means of a _plectrum_. The lyre specified as “Northern” (Fig. 179), was certainly the origin of the violin, to the shape of which it even then bore some resemblance; it was fastened at the top, and had a _cordier_ at the end of the sounding-board, as well as a bridge in the centre of the face of the instrument. The lyre was superseded by the psaltery and the cithern. The psaltery, which never was furnished with fewer than ten, or more than twenty, strings, differed essentially from the lyre and the cithern by the sounding-board being placed at the top of the instrument. Psalteries were made of a round, square, oblong, or buckler-shaped form (Fig. 181); and sometimes the sounding-box was lengthened so as to rest upon the shoulder of the musician (Fig. 180). The psaltery disappeared in the tenth century and gave place to the cithern (_cithara_), a name which had been at first applied to all kinds of stringed instruments. The shape of the cithern, which in the days of St. Jerome resembled a Greek _delta_ (Δ), varied in different countries, as is proved by the epithets--_barbarica_, _Teutonica_, _Anglica_, which we find at different times coupled with its generic name. In other places, in consequence of these local transformations, it became the _nabulum_, the _chorus_, and the _salterion_ or _psalterion_ (which latter must not be confounded with the psaltery, a primary derivative of the lyre). [Illustration: Fig. 180.--Psaltery to produce a prolonged sound. Ninth Century. (MS. in the Bibl. Imp., Paris.)] The _nabulum_[23] (Fig. 182) was made either in the shape of a triangle with truncated corners, or of a semicircle joined at the two extremities; its sounding-board occupied the whole of the rounded part, and left but a very limited space for the twelve strings. The _chorus_ or _choron_, the imperfect representation of which in the manuscripts of the ninth and tenth centuries calls to mind the appearance of a long semicircular window or of a Gothic capital N, generally had one of its sides prolonged, on which the performer leaned so as to hold the instrument in the same way as a harp (Fig. 183). [Illustration: Fig. 181.--Buckler-shaped Psaltery with many Strings. (Ninth Century. Boulogne MS.)] [Illustration: Fig. 182.--_Nabulum._ Ninth Century. (MS. d’Angers.)] [Illustration: Fig. 183.--_Choron._ Ninth Century. (Boulogne MS.)] [Illustration: Fig. 184.--_Psalterion._ Twelfth Century.]