to add my quota to the injustice under which this unfortunate
instrument suffers, I shall pass on to the mandore and lute. The
essential characteristic of these instruments is that their bodies,
instead of having the flat back of the guitar, are rounded. Though the
body is now built of strips of wood or ivory, its form is "reminiscent of
the time when the body or resonator consisted of a simple gourd or
half-gourd covered with skin." In this they resemble the instruments of
Oriental races, and the author traces the form of the rebec and mandoline
as well as that of the mandore and lute to Persian, Arabic, and Moorish
influence in the Middle Ages.

The European lute had at first only four strings, but in the "elaborate
instruments of the seventeenth century there were twenty-six or thirty
strings to be carefully tuned and regulated." No wonder that a lutenist
should have been said to spend three-quarters of his existence in tuning
his instrument. The mandore was a small form of lute, and is chiefly of
interest because in a yet smaller form it still survives as the
mandoline, which, however, usually has both wire and covered strings, and
is played with a plectrum. To return to the lute, its most obvious
characteristic is that the head (in which are the pegs for tuning the
strings) is bent at right-angles to the general plane of the instrument.
It is not clear what is the meaning of this curious crook in the
instrument, but it is some comfort to the ignorant since it enables us to
recognise a lute when we see one. Henry VIII. and his daughters Mary and
Elizabeth are said to have been good lutenists. The smaller gut strings,
called by the pleasant name of _minnikins_, were easily broken, and a
gift of lute-strings was considered a present fit for a queen, and one
which the great Elizabeth did not disdain.

There was also an archlute, which in its largest form--six feet in
height--was known as the chitarrone. It had not the rectangular bend in
the neck of the ordinary lute; it was also characterised by having four
or five free or unstopped strings. A fine reproduction of Lady Mary
Sidney and her archlute faces the title-page of the book.

Mr Galpin (p. 46) quotes from Thomas Mace's _Musick's Monument_, 1676,
the proper method of "fretting" a lute or similar instrument. The frets,
or horizontal strings or wires which make cross ridges on the neck of
lutes, viols, etc., I had ignorantly imagined to be guides to the