Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1883 edition. Excerpt: ... PART IV. Cj)e Opinions of tijt ress Opinionum commenta delet dies naturae judicia confirmat."--Cicero. As might be expected the Daily papers nearly without exception published leading articles on this "Cause Celebre," the principals of which I will now reproduce more or less in extenso. On the 13th February (the Monday after the trial, which took place on the Friday and Saturday) appeared the following in the Daily Telegraph: --"Long ago the poet64 told us in verse, wedded to one of the most beautiful. melodies in the world, that--'If the heart of a man is depressed with cares, The mist is dispelled when a woman appears: Like the notes of a fiddle, she sweetly, sweetly Raises the spirits and charms our ears.' "The fiddle is pre-eminently the instrument of peace and contentment, of gentle suasion and harmony among mankind. The fiddle charms the sailor as he labours at the bars of the capstan; 'tis a fiddle which St. Cecilia is playing in a famous piece of fifteenthcentury art;65 according to Rafaelle, the Muses, the Pierides, and the Graces were treated by Apollo to a grand concerto on the violin on the summit of Mount Parnassus;m some more will have it that Orpheus charmed the beasts by the strains of a fiddle and not of a lyre.67 The King of Instruments is now the provoker of merriment and now the consoler of sorrow. Can 'Haste to the Wedding' be played on anything more appropriate than a fiddle? When Charles II. was a wandering exile on the Continent, with scarce and precarious means and rapidly-dwindling friends, he wrote to a friend in Paris, beseeching him to send him 'a little fiddler/ whose music-making might solace him in his misery. On the other hand--so versatile are the attributes of the violin--we read that when good old...
