offered him a large sum if he could explain how the strange instrument
came into the possession of the great violinist.

After resigning his position as director of the Grand Opéra, Viotti
returned to London, which had become a second home to him, and spent his
remaining days there. He died on the 24th of March, 1824.


V.

Viotti established and settled for ever the fundamental principles of
violin-playing. He did not attain the marvelous skill of technique, the
varied subtile and dazzling effects, with which his successor, Paganini,
was to amaze the world, but, from the accounts transmitted to us, his
performance must have been characterized by great nobility, breadth, and
beauty of tone, united with a fire and agility unknown before his time.
Viotti was one of the first to use the Tourté 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 François Tourté, who lived in the
latter years of the last century in Paris, were of imperfect shape and
make. The Tourté 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 Tourté,