A Signor Angelo Casirola, of Tortona, mystified the good people of Milan, in 1825, by playing the _reverse_ way—that is, playing with _a fiddle_ upon _a bow_! His plan was to fasten the bow in an upright position upon a table, and play upon it with the violin, according to the best manner in which he could manage to “rub on.” The effect was unpleasing, both to ear and eye. Another of his tricks was a _sonata scherzosa_, for which he had two violins _fixed_, with the heads screwed on a table, and then worked away right and left, with a bow in each hand, accompanied by a full orchestra. He fooled his audience to the top of their bent, and was applauded to the very echo! It might assist the gratification of the gapers after novelty, if the thaumaturgist, operating with his left hand, as usual, on the finger-board of his instrument, were to have the _bow_ held and worked by _another person_. The Chinese flutists have done something like this in _principle_—one blowing the flute which another has played on! More wonderful still—at some entertainments given by their Emperor, two musicians played together the same air, each having one hand on his own flute, and the other on that of his companion! At Munich, in 1827, M. Féréol Mazas raised a public astonishment somewhat akin to that created in London more recently by Paganini, as an operator on _one string_: and, indeed, all the more _obvious_ peculiarities in the performance of the great Italian artist—those pertaining to mechanical dexterity—have been copied, more or less successfully. Assuming to be “the English Paganini,” a certain individual, of no distinction at that time as a legitimate player, was particularly prominent in this business of imitation. He presented, sooth to say, but a soul-less exhibition, having some of the externals of similitude, indeed, but none of that which “passeth _show_.” Upon the auditors scraped together, however, his “ad captandum” tricks appeared to tell abundantly—more especially when he worked with his left hand the pizzicato accompaniment to the bowed passages; when he brought out some harmonics from _below_, instead of _above_, the finger-stops; when (by way of going _beyond_ Paganini) he thrust the instrument between the hair and stick of the relaxed bow, and thus played on the strings with the _inner_ hair: and, above all, when he placed the bow between his knees, and, taking the fiddle in both hands, rubbed the strings against it, so as to execute some difficulties of which a judicious observer might have well regretted the possibility! One of the least pardonable of the faults attending this display, was that his instrument did not always _tell the truth_: in other words, its intonation was sometimes false. ECCENTRIC VARIETIES OF THE VIOLIN KIND.