“Your left hand thus upon the table, your lute firmly fixed, yourself and it in your true postures,—bring up your left hand from the table, bended, just like the balance of a hook, all excepting your thumb, which must stand straight and span'd out; your fingers also, all divided out from the other in an equal and handsome order; and in this posture, place your thumb under the neck of the lute, a little above the fret, just in the midst of the breadth of the neck; all your four-fingers in this posture, being held close over the strings on the other side, so that each finger may be in a readiness to stop down upon any fret. And now in this lively and exact posture, I would have your posture drawn, which is the most becoming posture I can direct unto for a lutanist.” “Know that an old lute is better than a new one.” Old instruments indeed, are found by experience to be far the best, the reasons for which Master Mace could no further dive into than to say, he apprehended, “that by extreme age, the wood and those other adjuncts, glue, parchment, paper, linings of cloth, (as some used) but above all the varnish, are by time very much dried, limped, made gentle, rarified, or to say better, even airified; so that that stiffness, stubbornness, or _clunguiness_ which is natural to such bodies, are so debilitated and made pliable, that the pores of the wood, have a more free liberty to move, stir or secretly vibrate; by which means the air (which is the life of all things both animate and inanimate) has a more free and easy recourse to pass and repass, &c. Whether I have hit upon the right cause, I know not, but sure I am that age adds goodness to instruments.” The Venice lutes were commonly good; and the most esteemed maker was Laux Malles, whose name was always written in text letters. Mace had seen two of his lutes, “pitiful, old, battered, cracked things;” yet for one of these, which Mr. Gootiere, the famous lutanist in his time showed him, the King paid an hundred pounds. The other belonged to Mr. Edward Jones, one of Gootiere's scholars; and he relates this “true story” of it; that a merchant bargained with the owner to take it with him in his travels, on trial; if he liked it, he was on his return to give an hundred pounds for it; otherwise he was to return it safe, and pay twenty pounds “for his experience and use of it.”—He had often seen lutes of three or four pounds a piece “more illustrious and taking to a common eye.”