The latest improvement attempted in construction, is, I understand, a discovery patented by an American. It is designed to give greater freedom to the _vibration_, by omitting the end (or top and bottom) blocks, and substituting an extra bass-bar, which runs longitudinally in contiguity to the back, but without touching it. The possession of a good _bow_ may be readily conceived to be a matter of no slight importance. With whatever reason the art of making violins may be considered (with the exceptions noticed in this chapter) to have declined since the days of the old makers, it is certain that the _bow_ has been altered much for the better: so much, indeed, as to seem hardly susceptible of further improvement. The bows of Tourte, of Paris, have acquired a European celebrity. Their superiority lies in their diminished weight, with increased elasticity in the stick; in the beautiful uniformity of their bend, which is so regulated as to cause the nearest approach made by the stick to the hair to be exactly in the middle, between the head and the nut; and in the very exact and finished workmanship of the whole. Here, too, acknowledgment is due to the ability of Vuillaume, who has contrived a bow in which two inconveniences, attendant on the previous method, are remedied; so that the hand of the performer is no longer disturbed by those variations in the length, and consequently in the weight, of the stick, which arose from the necessity of making the thumb to follow the shiftings of the nut, whenever the bow was altered as to its tension; while the hair, firmly fixed to a kind of cylindrical nippers, is so arranged as to form a perfectly even surface throughout its length, and to be renewable by the performer himself, when he may desire it. Let me point the termination of this chapter with a bit of cautionary advice, which, though it concerns bodies politic, invalids, and picture-owners, is not the less suited to the possessors of valuable instruments that require, through some casualty, the aid of a restorative hand:— BEWARE of _Vampers_! If, in some unhappy, incautious moment, you confide your cherished _Steiner_ or _Stradivari_ to the barbaric hands of one of these profane pretenders, its recovery is hopeless—its constitution is gone! CHAPTER X. MISCELLANEOUS ANECDOTES, COLLECTED SCRAPS, ECCENTRIC VARIETIES, ETC. “Quæ quibus ante-feram?”