ut has to stretch,
and cut the bed into which it is glued. Then I very carefully wash
the violin all over with a clean sponge wrung out of _warm_ water,
giving it plenty of time to dry before I finally clean every part
thoroughly with No. 0 glass-paper--and the violin is finished in the
white.

[Illustration: PLATE XXVIII.]

[Illustration: PLATE XXIX.]

[Illustration: PLATE XXX.]

CHAPTER XVI.
OF VARNISH AND VARNISHING.

To write an exhaustive essay on this most absorbing subject before
us, to go into any manner of detail at all in the present work, is
not my intention. It is far too wide, too subtle, and, in my
opinion, is an art of itself, requiring not only great space in
which to voice its merits, its component parts, and the thousand and
one compounds in which those parts assimilate, but the calm of the
study rather than the bustle of the workshop, given out deliberately
by him whose conclusions are based on the sound issues arising from
momentous research, careful analysis of former old examples, and an
utter abhorrence of prejudice, for or against this or that compound
or colour--prejudice, mind, actuating choice.

But in continuation, though somewhat in parenthesis, a choice based
on determined observation of a matter is quite another thing; and I
tell you at once my experience as between spirit and oil varnish
condemns the former, whilst it very strongly advocates the latter;
and when one considers that it is in the nature of oil to assimilate
with wood, and to throw up its beauties, and whilst a mellowness
clings to the very name, the reverse on all points being the case
with spirit, the surprise is that varnish other than of oil should
be tolerated.

Besides, see the difference in wear. Use a violin coated with
spirit, and if the friction from its employment be severe, you have
cracks, pieces chipping here and there, the instrument getting barer
and barer daily, so that in time little of it, the varnish, is left.
But it is not so with oil; the wear _is_ wear, not in chips, but in
gradual diminishing of its substance, always a something being left;
added to which a beauty springs from such, in that softer gradations
of colour radiate and form a greater _depth_, from the fact of such
colour or colours being more readily absorbed.

Again, in their relations to Tone, I place the oil varnishes first;
and I think the point is pretty generally conceded, for what is on
the face _power_, which som