of tone, united with a fire and agility unknown before his time.
Viotti was one of the first to use the Tourte bow, that indispensable
adjunct to the perfect manipulation of the violin. The value of this
advantage over his predecessors cannot be too highly estimated.

The bows used before the time of Francois Tourte, who lived in the
latter years of the last century in Paris, were of imperfect shape and
make. The Tourte model leaves nothing to be desired in all the qualities
required to enable the player to follow out every conceivable manner of
tone and movement--lightness, firmness, and elasticity. Tartini had made
the stick of his bow elastic, an innovation from the time of Corelli,
and had thus attained a certain flexibility and brilliancy in his bowing
superior to his predecessors. But the full development of all the powers
of the violin, or the practice of what we now call virtuosoism on this
instrument, was only possible with the modern bow as designed by Tourte,
of Paris. The thin, bent, elastic stick of the bow, with its greater
length of sweep, gives the modern player incalculable advantages over
those of an earlier age, enabling him to follow out the slightest
gradations of tone from the fullest _forte_ to the softest _piano_,
to mark all kinds of strong and gentle accents, to execute staccato,
legato, saltato, and arpeggio passages with the greatest ease and
certainty. The French school of violin-playing did not at first avail
itself of these advantages, and even Viotti and Spohr did not fully
grasp the new resources of execution. It was left for Paganini to open
a new era in the art. His daring and subtile genius perceived and seized
the wonderful resources of the modern bow at one bound. He used freely
every imaginable movement of the bow, and developed the movement of the
wrist to that high perfection which enabled him to practice all kinds
of bowing with celerity. Without the Tourte bow, Paganini and the modern
school of virtuosos, which has followed so splendidly from his example,
would have been impossible. To many of our readers an amplification of
this topic may be of interest. While the left hand of the violin-player
fixes the tone, and thereby does that which for the pianist is already
done by the mechanism of the instrument, and while the correctness of
his intonation depends on the proficiency of the left hand, it is the
action of the right hand, the bowing, which, analogous to the pianist's
touc