The people of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries understood all the varieties of _tinkle_ rather than of _tone_. They liked lovely, soft, gentle music, and they liked instruments such as the _viola da gamba_, and _viola d’amore_ strung with “sympathetic strings” set into vibration when the top strings were touched with the bow and that consequently gave forth gentle echoes, like those of the Æolian harp. We remember the Duke in _Twelfth Night_ asks a singer to repeat the music he has just played and sung: “_That strain again! it had a dying fall!_ _O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound_ _That breathes upon a bank of violets,_ _Stealing and giving odor._” We must not despise that quaint and antique music of the Seventeenth Century drawing-room. It was very high-bred, very refined, very delicate and very poetic. It had distinction; it had charm. But as times changed, manners and tastes changed with them. All of a sudden, so it seems, the instrument-makers, as we have seen, began to search for _tone_ and when the sharp, piercing and shrill (so it seemed to the people of the day) violin came into being, other instruments were needed to accompany it. Gradually, one by one, the delicate viols with their thin strings and the tinkling and swishing lutes went out of fashion and were made no longer. To-day their voices are almost unknown; for the old Viol Family is extinct. We have a new String Quartet that is distinguished for its great carrying tone,—rich, warm, sweet and vibrant. When it first came into favor, the violoncello was used to strengthen the bass part in vocal music, particularly in church music and also to reinforce the double-bass; but for a long time it made no appearance in the drawing-room. The _viola da gamba_ still held the first place in society. The first instance of a violoncello attracting attention is in 1691, when Domenico Galli of Parma, a famous wood-carver, made a superb violoncello which he presented to Francisco II, Duke of Modena, with a treatise on violoncello as a solo instrument and the art of playing it. Two other Italians in the first half of the Eighteenth Century, Antoniotti of Milan and Lanzetti,[12] violoncellist to the King of Sardinia (1730-1750), brought out compositions which are the first that recognize the capacities of this instrument. The Italians were, therefore, the earliest to develop the violoncello and also the art of playing it.