which may be seen and heard outside pubHc-houses to this very day, i.e., a small hollow chest, with the strings stretched across it. An instrument of this kind could be played with the fingers, like a harp, or with a plectrum, like a zither, or with two little knob-sticks, like the dulcimer. Mersennus (b. 1588) also identifies the Psaltery with the Dulcimer.
In the text, the Hautboy is only named once, in H. 4. B 32, 332, near the end of Falstaffs soliloquy, on old men and lying, where he says that Shallow was such a withered little wretch that the case of a treble hautboy was a mansion for him, a court.
The 'treble' hautboy corresponds with our modern instrument, and was the smallest in size of the hautboy tribe, of which only two now survive—viz., the Oboe proper, and its cousin, which is a fifth lower in pitch, and correspondingly larger, and which has curiously picked up the name of Corno Inglese, Cor Anglais, or English Horn. None the less it is the Alto Hautboy. The tenor and bass of the family have not survived. Hautboys in four parts were the backbone of the French regimental bands in Lully's time—i.e., about 1670. [ Appendix. ]
The spelling of the word in the old editions of
