ret lost to the world--as much so as
the glorious ruby lustre of Maestro Giorgio, and the blue so coveted
by connoisseurs of china. Mr. Charles Reade truly says: "No wonder,
then, that many Violin-makers have tried hard to discover the secret
of this varnish: many chemists have given anxious days and nights to
it. More than once, even in my time, hopes have run high, but only to
fall again. Some have even cried 'Eureka' to the public; but the
moment others looked at their discovery and compared it with the real
thing,

'Inextinguishable laughter shook the skies.'

At last despair has succeeded to all that energetic study, and the
varnish of Cremona is sullenly given up as a lost art."

Declining, therefore, all speculation as to what the varnish is or
what it is not, or any nostrums for its re-discovery, we will pass on
at once to the description of the different Italian varnishes, which
may be divided into four distinct classes, viz., the Brescian,
Cremonese, Neapolitan, and Venetian. These varnishes are quite
separable in one particular, which is, the depth of their colouring;
and yet three of them, the Brescian, Cremonese, and Venetian, have to
all appearance a common basis. This agreement may be accounted for
with some show of reason by the supposition that there must have been
a depot in each city where the varnish was sold in an incomplete form,
and that the depth of colour used, or even the means adopted for
colouring, rested with the maker of the instrument. If we examine the
Brescian varnish, we find an almost complete resemblance between the
material of Gasparo da Salo and that of his coadjutors, the colouring
only being different. Upon turning to the Cremonese, we find that
Guarneri, Stradivari, Carlo Bergonzi, and a few others, used varnish
having the same characteristics, but, again, different in shade;
possibly the method of laying it upon the instrument was peculiar to
each maker. Similar facts are observable in the Venetian specimens.
The varnish of Naples, again, is of a totally different composition,
and as it was chiefly in vogue after the Cremonese was lost, we may
conclude that it was probably produced by the Neapolitan makers for
their own need.

If we reflect for a moment upon the extensive use which these makers
made of the Cremonese varnish, it is reasonable to suppose that it was
an ordinary commodity in their days, and that there was then no secret
in the matter at all. To account for i