ongruity or want of
symmetry intruding to disturb once and always the gaze of the
connoisseur.

But it by no means follows that a grandly carved and completed model
has for its counterpart an equally bold yet subtly refined outline;
on the contrary, I have seen just the reverse, as I have also seen
most wretched modelling wedded to an outline fit to grace the finest
instrument extant. But it is not often so, for, as a rule, where a
mind is highly gifted, so that elegance breathes in what its body
creates, a broken line or curve comes as a great surprise, and one
is apt to doubt the same hand fashioned it all.

Be this as it may, call things by their proper names, and in elegant
terms where no quaint ones are sacrificed; and if you know better,
never let a false epithet pass unchallenged, for I do not see why a
refined, but _correct_, mode of expression should not be as
vigorously upheld in this fine art as in speaking of any of its
sisters. For surely vulgarity has no right of place in its
vocabulary, yet much language that is certainly not elegant, and not
of any particular force of expression, finds repose therein; and a
really beautiful and great work is neither made more lovely nor more
exalted through contact with that which has neither the status of
the one nor the other at heart, except that beauty or high estate be
ready ministers of a rapacity calculated sooner or later to bring
about its own terrible undoing.

So I resume, all being hard and dry, and begin to model the back.

CHAPTER V.
MODELLING THE BACK.

Pressing the plate firmly between the fixed rests on the bench, I
take three-quarter inch gouge, tool 22, and proceed to cut a channel
entirely round the wood to the depth of about one-twelfth of an inch
and about three-quarters of an inch broad from one-sixteenth or
rather less, of an inch from extreme edge, and through the purfling,
of course. The student will at once see that this is done as a base
from which is to spring the arching. There must be no attempt at a
_finished_ bend in going over this groove; but there must be the
greatest care observed in the cutting of it, as you are using the
tool following the outline, consequently, in the manner most liable
to encounter disaster in the shape of chips flying from that narrow
edging which it is your set business to leave as intact as possible.

After going over the wood in what I call "the guitar line," that is
to say, passing by for the