A keyboard of balanced keys may have been first introduced in the little portable organ known as the regal so often represented in old carvings, paintings, and stained windows. It derived its name regal from the rule (regula) or graduated scale of keys, and its use was to give the singers in religious processions the note or pitch. The only instrument of this kind known to exist in the United Kingdom is at Blair Athole, and it bears the very late date of 1630. The Brussels regal may be as modern. These are instances of how long a some-time admired musical instrument may remain in use after its first intention is forgotten. We attribute the adaptation of the narrow regal keyboard to what was still called the monochord, but was now a complex of monochords over one resonance board, to the latter half of the 14th century; it was accomplished by the substitution of tangents fixed in the further ends of the balanced keys for the movable bridges of the monochord or such stoppers as are shown in the Shrewsbury carving. Thus the monochordium or “payre of monochordis” became the clavichordium or “payre of clavichordis ”—pair being applied, in the old sense of a “pair of steps,” to a series of degrees. This use of the word to imply gradation was common in England to all keyed instruments; thus we read, in the Tudor period and later, of a pair of régals, organs, of virginals.

The earliest known record of the clavichord occurs in some rules of the minnesingers, dated 1404, preserved at Vienna. The monochord is named with it, showing a differentiation of these instruments, and of them from the clavicymbalum, the keyed cymbal, cembalo (Italian), or psaltery. From this we learn that a keyboard had been thus early adapted to that favourite mediaeval stringed instrument, the “cembalo” of Boccaccio, the “sautrie” of Chaucer. There were two forms of the psaltery:—(l)the trapeze, one of the oldest representations of which is to be found in Orcagna’s famous Trionfo della Morte in the Campo Santo at Pisa, and another by the same painter in the National Gallery, London; and (2) the contemporary “testa di porco,” the pig’s head, which was of triangular shape as the name suggests. The trapeze psaltery was strung horizontally, the “istromento di porco” either horizontally or vertically,—the notes, as in the common dulcimer, being in groups of three or four unisons. In these differences of form and stringing we see the cause of the ultimate differentiation of the spinet and harpsichord. The compass of the psalteries was nearly that of Guido’s scale; but, according to Mersenne, the lowest interval was a fourth, G to C, which is worthy of notice as anticipating the later “short measure” of the spinet and organ.

The simplicity of the clavichord inclines us to place it, in order of time, before the clavicymbalum or clavicembalo: but we do not know how the sounds of the latter were at first excited. There is an indication as to its early fcrm to be seen in the church of the Certosa near Pavia, which compares in probable date with the Shrewsbury example. We quote the reference to it from Dr Ambros’s History of Music. He says a carving represents King David as holding an “istromento di porco” which has eight strings and as many keys lying parallel to them; he touches the keys with the right hand and damps the strings with the left. The attribution of archaism applies with equal force to this carving as to the Shrewsbury one, for when the monastery of Certosa was built chromatic keyboards, which imply a considerable advance, were already in use. There is an authentic representation of a chromatic keyboard, painted not later than 1426, in the St Cecilia panel (now at Berlin) of the famous Adoration of the Lamb by the Van Eycks. The instrument depicted is a positive organ, and it is interesting to notice in this realistic painting that the keys are evidently boxwood as in the Italian spinets of later date, and that the angel plays a common chord—A with the right hand, F and C with the left. But diatonic organs with eight steps or keys in the octave, which included the B flat and the B natural, as in Guido’s scale, were long preserved, for Praetorius speaks of them as still existing nearly two hundred years later. This diatonic keyboard, we learn from Sebastian Virdung (Musica geputscht und auszgezogen, Basel, 1511), was the keyboard of the early clavichord. We reproduce his diagram as the only authority we have for the disposition of the one short key.

The extent of this scale is exactly Guido’s. Virdung’s diagram of the chromatic is the same as our own familiar keyboard, and comprises three octaves and a note, from F below the bass stave to G above the treble. But Virdung tells us that even then clavichords were made longer than four octaves by repetition of the same order of keys. The introduction of the chromatic order he attributes to the study of Boetius, and the consequent endeavour to restore the three musical genera of the Greeks-—the diatonic, chromatic, and enharmonic. But the last-named had not been attained. Virdung gives woodcuts of the clavicordium, the virginal, the clavicimbalum, and the claviciterium. We reproduce three of them (figs. 3, 6, and 12), omitting the virginal as obviously incorrect. All these drawings have been continually repeated by writers on musical instruments up to the present day, but without discerning that in the printing they are reversed, which puts the keyboards entirely wrong, and that in Luscinius’s Latin translation of Virdung ÇMusurgia, sive Praxis Musicae, Strasburg, 1536), which has been hitherto chiefly followed, two of the engravings, the clavicimbalum and the claviciterium, are transposed, another cause of error. Martin Agricola (Musica Instrumentalis, Wittenberg, 1529) has copied Virdung’s illustrations with some differences of perspective, and the addition, here and there, of errors of his own.

Still vulgarly known as monochord, Virdung’s clavichord was really a box of monochords, all the strings being of the same length. He derives the clavichord from Guido’s monochord as he does the virginal from the psaltery, but, at the same time, confesses he does not know when, or by whom, either instrument was invented. We observe in this drawing the short sound-board, which always remained a clavichord peculiarity, and the straight soundboard bridge—necessarily so when all the strings were of one length. To gain an angle of striking place for the tangents against the strings the keys were made crooked, an expedient further rendered necessary by the “fretting,”— three tangents, according to Virdung, being directed to stop as many notes from each single group of three strings tuned in unison; each tangent thus made a different vibrating length of string. In the drawing the strings are merely indicated. The German for fret is Bund, and such a clavichord, in that language, is known as a “gebunden” one, both fret (to rub) and Bund (from binden, to bind) having been taken over from the lute or viol. The French and Italians employ “touche” and “tasto,” touch. Praetorius, who wrote a hundred years later than Virdung, says two, three, and four tangents were thus employed in stopping. The oldest clavichords extant have no more than two tangents to a note formed by a pair of strings, no longer three. Thus seven pairs of strings suffice for an octave of twelve keys, the open notes being F, G, A, B flat, C, D, E flat, and by an unexplained peculiarity, perhaps derived from some special estimation of the notes which was connected with the church modes, A and D are left throughout free from a second tangent. A corresponding value of these notes is shown by their independence of chromatic alteration in tuning the double Irish harp, as explained by Galilei in his treatise on music, published in 1581. Adlung, who died in 1762, speaks of another fretting, but we think it must have been an adaptation to the modern major scale, the “free” notes being E and B. Clavichords were made with double fretting up to about the year 1700,—that is to say, to the epoch of J. S. Bach, who, taking advantage of its abolition and the consequent use of independent pairs of strings for each note, was enabled to tune in all keys equally, which had been impossible so long as the fretting was maintained. The modern scales having become established, Bach was now able to produce, in 1722, Das wohltemperirte Clavier, the first collection of preludes and fugues in all the twenty-four major .and minor scales for a clavichord which was tuned, as to concordance and dissonance, fairly equal.

The oldest clavichord, here called manicordo (as French, manicorde, from monochord), known to exist is that shown in fig. 4. It will be observed that the lowest octave is here already “bundfrei” or fret-free. The strings are no longer of equal length, and there are three bridges, divisions of the one bridge, in different positions on the sound-board. Mersenne’s “manicorde” (Harmonie Universelle, 1636), shown in an engraving in that work, has the strings still nearly of equal length, but divides the sound-board bridge into five. The fretted clavichords made in Germany in the last years of the 17th century have the curved sound-board bridge, like a spinet. In the clavichord the tangents always form the second bridge, indispensable for the vibration, as well as act as the sound exciters (fig. 5). The common damper to all the strings is a list of cloth, interwoven behind the tangents. As the tangents quitted the strings the cloth immediately stopped vibration. Too much cloth would diminish the tone of this already feeble instrument, which gained the name of “dumb spinet” from its use. The cloth is accurately painted in the clavichord Rubens’s St Cecilia (Dresden Gallery) plays upon,—interesting as perhaps representing that painter’s own instrument. The number of keys there shown is three octaves and a third, F to A, —the same extent as in Handel’s clavichord now in the museum at Maidstone (an Italian instrument dated 1726, and not fretted), but with a combined chromatic and short octave peculiarity in the lowest notes we shall have to refer to when we arrive at the spinet; we pass it by as the only instance in the clavichord we have met with. The clavichord must have gone out of favour in Great Britain and the Netherlands early in the 16th century, before its expressive power, which is of the most tender and intimate quality, could have been, from the nature of the music played, observed,—the more brilliant and elegant spinet being preferred to it. Like the other keyboard instruments it had no German name, and can hardly have been of German origin. Holbein, in his drawing of the family of Sir Thomas More, 1528, now at Basel, indicates the place for “Klavikordi und ander Seytinspill.” But it remained longest in use in Germany—until even the beginning of the present century. It was the favourite “Klavier” of the Bachs. Besides that of Handel already noticed, there are in existence clavichords the former possession of which is attributed to Mozart and Beethoven. The clavichord was obedient to a peculiarity of touch possible on no other keyboard instrument. This is described by C. P. Emmanuel Bach in his famous essay on playing and accompaniment, entitled Versuch über die wahre Art das Klavier zu spielen (An Essay on the True Way to play Keyboard Instruments). It is the “Bebung” (trembling), a vibration in a melody note zl the same nature as that frequently employed by violin players to heighten the expressive effect; it was gained by a repeated movement of the fleshy end of the finger while the key was still held down. The “Bebung” was indicated in the notation by dots over the note to be affected by it, perhaps showing how many times the note should be repeated. According to the practice of the Bachs, as handed down to us in the above mentioned essay, great smoothness of touch was required to play the clavichord in tune. As with the monochord, the means taken to produce the sound disturbed the accuracy of the string measurement by increasing tension, so that a key touched too firmly in the clavichord, by unduly raising the string, sharpened the pitch, an error in playing deprecated by C. P. Emmanuel Bach. This answers the assertion which has been made that J. S. Bach could not have been nice about tuning when he played from preference on an instrument of uncertain intonation.

The next instrument described by Virdung is the virginal (virginalis, proper for a girl), a parallelogram in shape, with a projecting keyboard and compass of keys the same as the clavichordium. Here we can trace derivation from the psaltery in the sound-board covering the entire inner surface of the instrument and in the triangular disposition of the strings. The latter in Virdung’s drawing has an impossible position with reference to the keyboard, which renders its reproduction as an illustration useless. But in the next drawing, the clavicimbalum, this is rectified, and the drawing, reversed on account of the key-board, can be accepted as roughly representing the instrument so called (fig. 6).

There would be no difference between it and the virginal were it not for a peculiarity of keyboard compass, which emphatically refers itself to the Italian “spinetta,” a name unnoticed by Virdung or by his countryman

Arnold Schlick, who, in the same year 1511, published his Spiegel der Orgelmacher (“ Organ-builders’ Mirror”), and named the clavichordium and clavicimbalum as familiar instruments. In the first place, the keyboard, beginning apparently with B natural, instead of F, makes the clavicimbalum smaller than the virginal, the strings in this arrangement being shorter; in the next place it is almost certain that the Italian spinet compass, beginning apparently upon a semitone, is identical with a “short measure” or “short octave” organ compass, a very old keyboard arrangement, by which the lowest note, representing B, really sounded G, and C sharp in like manner A. The origin of this may be deduced from the psaltery and many representations of the regal, and its object appears to have been to obtain dominant basses for cadences,—harmonious closes haying early been sought for as giving pleasure to the ear. We have found a hitherto unnoticed authority for this practice in Mersenne, who, in 1636, expressly describes it as occurring in his own spinet (espinette). He says the keyboards of the spinet and organ are the same. Now, in his Latin edition of the same work he renders espinette by clavicimbalum. We read (Harmonie Universelle, Paris, 1636, liv. 3, p. 107)—“Its longest string [his spinet’s] is little more than a foot in length between the two bridges. It has only thirty-one steps [“marches ”] in its keyboard, and as many strings over its sound-board [he now refers to the illustration], so that there are five keys hidden on account of the perspective,—that is to say, three naturals and two sharps ∖ a feintes," same as the Latin ficti∖, of which the first is cut into two (a divided sharp forming two keys); but these sharps serve to go down to the third and fourth below the first step, C sol [tenor clef C], in order to go as far as the third octave, for the eighteen principal steps make but an eighteenth, that is to say, a fourth more than two octaves.” The note we call F he, on his engraving, letters as C, indicating the pitch of a spinet of the second size, which the one described is not. The third and fourth, reached by his cut sharp, are consequently the lower E and D; or, to complete, as he says, the third octave, the lowest note might be F, but for that he would want the diatonic semitone B, which his spinet, according to his description, did not possess. Mersenne’s statement sufficiently proves, first, the use in spinets as well as in organs of what we now call “short measure,” and, secondly, the intention of cut sharps at the lower end of the keyboard to gain lower notes. He speaks of one string only to each note; unlike the double and triple strung clavichord, those instruments, clavicimbalum, spinet, or virginal, derived from the psaltery, could only present one string to the mechanical plectrum which twanged it. As regards the kind of plectra earliest used we have no evidence. The little crow-quill points, Scaliger, who was born in 1484, ex-ρressly says were introduced when he was a boy. They project from centred tongues in uprights of wood known as “jacks” (fig. 7), which also carry the dampers. The quills, rising by the depression of the keys in front, set the strings vibrating as they pass them, —springs at first of steel, later of bristle, giving energy to the twang and governing their return. Scaliger remembered the “harpichordum” and “clavicimbalum” being without those quillpoints (mucrones), and attributes the introduction of the name “spinetta” to them (from spina, a thorn). We will leave harpichordum for the present, but the early identity of clavicimbalum and spinetta is certainly proved. Scaliger’s etymology has remained unquestioned until quite recently; it is due to Signor Ponsicchi of Florence to have discovered another derivation. He has found in a rare book entitled Conclusione nel suono dell ’ organo, di D. Adiano Banchieri (Bologna, 1608), the following passage, which translated reads :—“Spinetta was thus named from the inventor of that oblong form, who was one Maestro Giovanni Spinetti, a Venetian; and I have seen one of...

A keyboard of balanced keys may have been first introduced in the little portable organ known as the regal so often represented in old carvings, paintings, and stained windows. It derived its name regal from the rule (regula) or graduated scale of keys, and its use was to give the singers in religious processions the note or pitch. The only instrument of this kind known to exist in the United Kingdom is at Blair Athole, and it bears the very late date of 1630. The Brussels regal may be as modern. These are instances of how long a some-time admired musical instrument may remain in use after its first intention is forgotten. We attribute the adaptation of the narrow regal keyboard to what was still called the monochord, but was now a complex of monochords over one resonance board, to the latter half of the 14th century; it was accomplished by the substitution of tangents fixed in the further ends of the balanced keys for the movable bridges of the monochord or such stoppers as are shown in the Shrewsbury carving. Thus the monochordium or “payre of monochordis” became the clavichordium or “payre of clavichordis ”—pair being applied, in the old sense of a “pair of steps,” to a series of degrees. This use of the word to imply gradation was common in England to all keyed instruments; thus we read, in the Tudor period and later, of a pair of régals, organs, of virginals.

The earliest known record of the clavichord occurs in some rules of the minnesingers, dated 1404, preserved at Vienna. The monochord is named with it, showing a differentiation of these instruments, and of them from the clavicymbalum, the keyed cymbal, cembalo (Italian), or psaltery. From this we learn that a keyboard had been thus early adapted to that favourite mediaeval stringed instrument, the “cembalo” of Boccaccio, the “sautrie” of Chaucer. There were two forms of the psaltery:—(l)the trapeze, one of the oldest representations of which is to be found in Orcagna’s famous Trionfo della Morte in the Campo Santo at Pisa, and another by the same painter in the National Gallery, London; and (2) the contemporary “testa di porco,” the pig’s head, which was of triangular shape as the name suggests. The trapeze psaltery was strung horizontally, the “istromento di porco” either horizontally or vertically,—the notes, as in the common dulcimer, being in groups of three or four unisons. In these differences of form and stringing we see the cause of the ultimate differentiation of the spinet and harpsichord. The compass of the psalteries was nearly that of Guido’s scale; but, according to Mersenne, the lowest interval was a fourth, G to C, which is worthy of notice as anticipating the later “short measure” of the spinet and organ.

The simplicity of the clavichord inclines us to place it, in order of time, before the clavicymbalum or clavicembalo: but we do not know how the sounds of the latter were at first excited. There is an indication as to its early fcrm to be seen in the church of the Certosa near Pavia, which compares in probable date with the Shrewsbury example. We quote the reference to it from Dr Ambros’s History of Music. He says a carving represents King David as holding an “istromento di porco” which has eight strings and as many keys lying parallel to them; he touches the keys with the right hand and damps the strings with the left. The attribution of archaism applies with equal force to this carving as to the Shrewsbury one, for when the monastery of Certosa was built chromatic keyboards, which imply a considerable advance, were already in use. There is an authentic representation of a chromatic keyboard, painted not later than 1426, in the St Cecilia panel (now at Berlin) of the famous Adoration of the Lamb by the Van Eycks. The instrument depicted is a positive organ, and it is interesting to notice in this realistic painting that the keys are evidently boxwood as in the Italian spinets of later date, and that the angel plays a common chord—A with the right hand, F and C with the left. But diatonic organs with eight steps or keys in the octave, which included the B flat and the B natural, as in Guido’s scale, were long preserved, for Praetorius speaks of them as still existing nearly two hundred years later. This diatonic keyboard, we learn from Sebastian Virdung (Musica geputscht und auszgezogen, Basel, 1511), was the keyboard of the early clavichord. We reproduce his diagram as the only authority we have for the disposition of the one short key.

The extent of this scale is exactly Guido’s. Virdung’s diagram of the chromatic is the same as our own familiar keyboard, and comprises three octaves and a note, from F below the bass stave to G above the treble. But Virdung tells us that even then clavichords were made longer than four octaves by repetition of the same order of keys. The introduction of the chromatic order he attributes to the study of Boetius, and the consequent endeavour to restore the three musical genera of the Greeks-—the diatonic, chromatic, and enharmonic. But the last-named had not been attained. Virdung gives woodcuts of the clavicordium, the virginal, the clavicimbalum, and the claviciterium. We reproduce three of them (figs. 3, 6, and 12), omitting the virginal as obviously incorrect. All these drawings have been continually repeated by writers on musical instruments up to the present day, but without discerning that in the printing they are reversed, which puts the keyboards entirely wrong, and that in Luscinius’s Latin translation of Virdung ÇMusurgia, sive Praxis Musicae, Strasburg, 1536), which has been hitherto chiefly followed, two of the engravings, the clavicimbalum and the claviciterium, are transposed, another cause of error. Martin Agricola (Musica Instrumentalis, Wittenberg, 1529) has copied Virdung’s illustrations with some differences of perspective, and the addition, here and there, of errors of his own.

Still vulgarly known as monochord, Virdung’s clavichord was really a box of monochords, all the strings being of the same length. He derives the clavichord from Guido’s monochord as he does the virginal from the psaltery, but, at the same time, confesses he does not know when, or by whom, either instrument was invented. We observe in this drawing the short sound-board, which always remained a clavichord peculiarity, and the straight soundboard bridge—necessarily so when all the strings were of one length. To gain an angle of striking place for the tangents against the strings the keys were made crooked, an expedient further rendered necessary by the “fretting,”— three tangents, according to Virdung, being directed to stop as many notes from each single group of three strings tuned in unison; each tangent thus made a different vibrating length of string. In the drawing the strings are merely indicated. The German for fret is Bund, and such a clavichord, in that language, is known as a “gebunden” one, both fret (to rub) and Bund (from binden, to bind) having been taken over from the lute or viol. The French and Italians employ “touche” and “tasto,” touch. Praetorius, who wrote a hundred years later than Virdung, says two, three, and four tangents were thus employed in stopping. The oldest clavichords extant have no more than two tangents to a note formed by a pair of strings, no longer three. Thus seven pairs of strings suffice for an octave of twelve keys, the open notes being F, G, A, B flat, C, D, E flat, and by an unexplained peculiarity, perhaps derived from some special estimation of the notes which was connected with the church modes, A and D are left throughout free from a second tangent. A corresponding value of these notes is shown by their independence of chromatic alteration in tuning the double Irish harp, as explained by Galilei in his treatise on music, published in 1581. Adlung, who died in 1762, speaks of another fretting, but we think it must have been an adaptation to the modern major scale, the “free” notes being E and B. Clavichords were made with double fretting up to about the year 1700,—that is to say, to the epoch of J. S. Bach, who, taking advantage of its abolition and the consequent use of independent pairs of strings for each note, was enabled to tune in all keys equally, which had been impossible so long as the fretting was maintained. The modern scales having become established, Bach was now able to produce, in 1722, Das wohltemperirte Clavier, the first collection of preludes and fugues in all the twenty-four major .and minor scales for a clavichord which was tuned, as to concordance and dissonance, fairly equal.

The oldest clavichord, here called manicordo (as French, manicorde, from monochord), known to exist is that shown in fig. 4. It will be observed that the lowest octave is here already “bundfrei” or fret-free. The strings are no longer of equal length, and there are three bridges, divisions of the one bridge, in different positions on the sound-board. Mersenne’s “manicorde” (Harmonie Universelle, 1636), shown in an engraving in that work, has the strings still nearly of equal length, but divides the sound-board bridge into five. The fretted clavichords made in Germany in the last years of the 17th century have the curved sound-board bridge, like a spinet. In the clavichord the tangents always form the second bridge, indispensable for the vibration, as well as act as the sound exciters (fig. 5). The common damper to all the strings is a list of cloth, interwoven behind the tangents. As the tangents quitted the strings the cloth immediately stopped vibration. Too much cloth would diminish the tone of this already feeble instrument, which gained the name of “dumb spinet” from its use. The cloth is accurately painted in the clavichord Rubens’s St Cecilia (Dresden Gallery) plays upon,—interesting as perhaps representing that painter’s own instrument. The number of keys there shown is three octaves and a third, F to A, —the same extent as in Handel’s clavichord now in the museum at Maidstone (an Italian instrument dated 1726, and not fretted), but with a combined chromatic and short octave peculiarity in the lowest notes we shall have to refer to when we arrive at the spinet; we pass it by as the only instance in the clavichord we have met with. The clavichord must have gone out of favour in Great Britain and the Netherlands early in the 16th century, before its expressive power, which is of the most tender and intimate quality, could have been, from the nature of the music played, observed,—the more brilliant and elegant spinet being preferred to it. Like the other keyboard instruments it had no German name, and can hardly have been of German origin. Holbein, in his drawing of the family of Sir Thomas More, 1528, now at Basel, indicates the place for “Klavikordi und ander Seytinspill.” But it remained longest in use in Germany—until even the beginning of the present century. It was the favourite “Klavier” of the Bachs. Besides that of Handel already noticed, there are in existence clavichords the former possession of which is attributed to Mozart and Beethoven. The clavichord was obedient to a peculiarity of touch possible on no other keyboard instrument. This is described by C. P. Emmanuel Bach in his famous essay on playing and accompaniment, entitled Versuch über die wahre Art das Klavier zu spielen (An Essay on the True Way to play Keyboard Instruments). It is the “Bebung” (trembling), a vibration in a melody note zl the same nature as that frequently employed by violin players to heighten the expressive effect; it was gained by a repeated movement of the fleshy end of the finger while the key was still held down. The “Bebung” was indicated in the notation by dots over the note to be affected by it, perhaps showing how many times the note should be repeated. According to the practice of the Bachs, as handed down to us in the above mentioned essay, great smoothness of touch was required to play the clavichord in tune. As with the monochord, the means taken to produce the sound disturbed the accuracy of the string measurement by increasing tension, so that a key touched too firmly in the clavichord, by unduly raising the string, sharpened the pitch, an error in playing deprecated by C. P. Emmanuel Bach. This answers the assertion which has been made that J. S. Bach could not have been nice about tuning when he played from preference on an instrument of uncertain intonation.

The next instrument described by Virdung is the virginal (virginalis, proper for a girl), a parallelogram in shape, with a projecting keyboard and compass of keys the same as the clavichordium. Here we can trace derivation from the psaltery in the sound-board covering the entire inner surface of the instrument and in the triangular disposition of the strings. The latter in Virdung’s drawing has an impossible position with reference to the keyboard, which renders its reproduction as an illustration useless. But in the next drawing, the clavicimbalum, this is rectified, and the drawing, reversed on account of the key-board, can be accepted as roughly representing the instrument so called (fig. 6).

There would be no difference between it and the virginal were it not for a peculiarity of keyboard compass, which emphatically refers itself to the Italian “spinetta,” a name unnoticed by Virdung or by his countryman

Arnold Schlick, who, in the same year 1511, published his Spiegel der Orgelmacher (“ Organ-builders’ Mirror”), and named the clavichordium and clavicimbalum as familiar instruments. In the first place, the keyboard, beginning apparently with B natural, instead of F, makes the clavicimbalum smaller than the virginal, the strings in this arrangement being shorter; in the next place it is almost certain that the Italian spinet compass, beginning apparently upon a semitone, is identical with a “short measure” or “short octave” organ compass, a very old keyboard arrangement, by which the lowest note, representing B, really sounded G, and C sharp in like manner A. The origin of this may be deduced from the psaltery and many representations of the regal, and its object appears to have been to obtain dominant basses for cadences,—harmonious closes haying early been sought for as giving pleasure to the ear. We have found a hitherto unnoticed authority for this practice in Mersenne, who, in 1636, expressly describes it as occurring in his own spinet (espinette). He says the keyboards of the spinet and organ are the same. Now, in his Latin edition of the same work he renders espinette by clavicimbalum. We read (Harmonie Universelle, Paris, 1636, liv. 3, p. 107)—“Its longest string [his spinet’s] is little more than a foot in length between the two bridges. It has only thirty-one steps [“marches ”] in its keyboard, and as many strings over its sound-board [he now refers to the illustration], so that there are five keys hidden on account of the perspective,—that is to say, three naturals and two sharps ∖ a feintes," same as the Latin ficti∖, of which the first is cut into two (a divided sharp forming two keys); but these sharps serve to go down to the third and fourth below the first step, C sol [tenor clef C], in order to go as far as the third octave, for the eighteen principal steps make but an eighteenth, that is to say, a fourth more than two octaves.” The note we call F he, on his engraving, letters as C, indicating the pitch of a spinet of the second size, which the one described is not. The third and fourth, reached by his cut sharp, are consequently the lower E and D; or, to complete, as he says, the third octave, the lowest note might be F, but for that he would want the diatonic semitone B, which his spinet, according to his description, did not possess. Mersenne’s statement sufficiently proves, first, the use in spinets as well as in organs of what we now call “short measure,” and, secondly, the intention of cut sharps at the lower end of the keyboard to gain lower notes. He speaks of one string only to each note; unlike the double and triple strung clavichord, those instruments, clavicimbalum, spinet, or virginal, derived from the psaltery, could only present one string to the mechanical plectrum which twanged it. As regards the kind of plectra earliest used we have no evidence. The little crow-quill points, Scaliger, who was born in 1484, ex-ρressly says were introduced when he was a boy. They project from centred tongues in uprights of wood known as “jacks” (fig. 7), which also carry the dampers. The quills, rising by the depression of the keys in front, set the strings vibrating as they pass them, —springs at first of steel, later of bristle, giving energy to the twang and governing their return. Scaliger remembered the “harpichordum” and “clavicimbalum” being without those quillpoints (mucrones), and attributes the introduction of the name “spinetta” to them (from spina, a thorn). We will leave harpichordum for the present, but the early identity of clavicimbalum and spinetta is certainly proved. Scaliger’s etymology has remained unquestioned until quite recently; it is due to Signor Ponsicchi of Florence to have discovered another derivation. He has found in a rare book entitled Conclusione nel suono dell ’ organo, di D. Adiano Banchieri (Bologna, 1608), the following passage, which translated reads :—“Spinetta was thus named from the inventor of that oblong form, who was one Maestro Giovanni Spinetti, a Venetian; and I have seen one of...