That John who stoutly refused to sell his fiddle in order to buy his wife a gown placed the ideal above the material.  It is to be hoped Mrs. John enjoyed music more than gay attire.  Certainly the dame who was forced to dance without her shoe until the master found his fiddling-stick knew the worth of the fiddler’s art.

It may have been from a play on the word catgut that so many of these ditties represent pussy in relation with the fiddle.  True fiddler’s magic belonged to the cat whose fiddling made the cow jump over the moon, the little dog laugh and the dish run away with the spoon.  Rarely accomplished too was the cat that came fiddling out of the barn with a pair of bagpipes under her arm, singing “Fiddle cum fee, the mouse has married the humble bee.”

Scientists tell us that crickets, grasshoppers, locusts and the like are fiddlers.  Their hind legs are their fiddle-bows, and by drawing these briskly up and down the projecting veins of their wing-covers they produce the sounds that characterize them.  Was it in imitation of these small winged creatures that man first experimented with the friction of bow and strings as a means of making music?  Scarcely.  It was the result of similar instinct on a larger human scale.

String instruments played with a bow may be traced to a remote period among various Oriental peoples.  An example of their simplest form exists in the ravanastron, or banjo-fiddle, supposed to have been invented by King Ravana, who reigned in Ceylon some 5,000 years ago.  It is formed of a small cylindrical sounding-body, with a stick running through it for a neck, a bridge, and a single string of silk, or at most two strings.  Its primitive bow was a long hairless cane rod which produced sound when drawn across the silk.  Better tone was derived from strings plucked with fingers or plectrum, and so the rude contrivance remained long undeveloped.

The European violin is the logical outcome of the appliance of the bow to those progenitors of the pianoforte, the Greek monochord and lyre, precisely as our music is the outgrowth of the diatonic scale developed by the Greeks from those instruments.  Numerous obstacles stand in the way of defining its story, but it is known that from the ninth century to the thirteenth bow instruments gained in importance.  They divided into two classes—­the viol proper, with flat back and breast and indented sides, to which belonged the veille, videl, or as it has been called, guitar-fiddle, and the pear-shaped type, such as the gigue and rebec.  The latter is what Chaucer calls the rubible.

Possibly an impulse was given the fiddle by the Moorish rebab, brought into Spain in the eighth century, but ancient Celtic bards had long before this used a bow instrument—­the chrotta or crwth, derived from the lyre, which was introduced by the Romans in their colonizing expeditions.  As early as 560 A. D., Venantius Fortunatus, Bishop of Poitiers, wrote to the Duke of Champagne: