“The ancients seem to have been wholly unacquainted with one of the principal expedients for producing sound from the strings of modern instruments: this is the _bow_. It has long been a dispute among the learned whether the violin, or any instrument of that kind, as now played with a _bow_, was known to the ancients. The little figure of Apollo, playing on a kind of violin, with something _like_ a bow, in the Grand Duke’s _Tribuna_ at Florence, which Mr. Addison and others supposed to be antique, has been proved to be _modern_ by the Abbé Winkelmann and Mr. Mings: so that, as this was the only piece of sculpture reputed ancient, in which any thing like a bow could be found, nothing more remains to be discussed relative to that point.”—(_Hist. of Music_, 4to. vol. i, p. 494.) The Welch, who are notoriously obstinate genealogists, have not failed to mark the Fiddle for _their_ own, and to assign him an origin, at some very distant date, among their native mountains. In support of this pretension, they bring forward a very ugly and clownish-looking fellow, with the uncouth name of _crwth_. This creature certainly belongs to them, and is so old as to have sometimes succeeded in being mistaken, in this country, for the father of the violin tribe—a mistake to which the old English terms of _crowd_ for fiddle, and _crowder_ for fiddler, seem to have lent some countenance. A little investigation, however, shows us that it was merely the name, and not the object itself, that we borrowed, for a time, from our Welch neighbours; and that, by a metonymy, more free than complimentary, we fastened the appellation of _crowd_ upon the _violin_, already current among us by transmission from the continent. The confusion thence arising has occasioned considerable misapprehension: nor has the effect of it been limited to our own island boundaries; for a French writer, M. Fétis, in one of his Letters on the State of Music in England, reports the error, without any apparent consciousness of its being such. Let us quote his passage in English: “The _cruth_ is a bowed instrument, which is thought to have been the origin of the viola and violin. Its form is that of an _oblong square_, the lower part of which forms the body of the instrument. It is mounted with four strings, and played on like a violin, but is more difficult in the treatment, because, not being hollowed out at the side, there is no free play for the action of the bow.”