From the very marked disparity subsisting, of necessity, between the Professor and the Amateur—a disparity greater as respects the Violin, than is observable as to any other instrument—it should follow that modesty was a general characteristic of the non-professional class. Yet, as if to confirm the truth of the current axiom, that “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” it occurs too often that the deference due to laborious attainment is withheld, and that the Amateur, content with a mode of playing as noisy as it is shallow, assumes a prominence which exposes him to ridicule, and gives pain to his friends, on _his_ account, if not on their own. If he do not err after this fashion, he will perhaps affect to hold cheap the talent which he finds it were _dear_ to imitate. It has been found, in the matter of hand-writing, that lordly personages have sometimes scrawled illegibly, rather than write in such fairer characters as might make them seem to possess a knowledge in common with clerks and schoolmasters. In like manner, certain dandy dilettanti, so far from regarding the interval of merit between themselves and the accomplished professor as a “hiatus valde deflendus,” or at least as a reason for becoming diffidence on their own part, have curled the lip of disdain, while hinting that _their_ style of playing was not that of people who _played to live_;—as if, by a strange contrariety of ideas, it were _de_preciation to perform for a price! There is something to our purpose on this head in the first volume of Anecdotes, &c. by Miss Hawkins: and here is the passage:— “Dr. Cooke, the composer, was giving lessons on the violin to a young man of a noble family. The young man was beginning to play; but, in the common impetuosity of a novice, he passed over all the _rests_. He therefore soon left his master far behind him. ‘Stop, stop, Sir!’ said the Doctor, ‘just take me with you!’ This was a very unpleasant check to one who fancied he was going on famously; and it required to be more than once enforced; till at length it was necessary to argue the point, which the Doctor did with his usual candour, representing the _necessity_ of these observances. The pupil, instead of shewing any sign of conviction, replied rather coarsely, ‘Ay, ay, it may be necessary for _you_, who get your living by it, to mind these trifles; but _I_ don’t want to be so exact!’”