GLOVES, BS, AND BUTTONS.

"He said he had his gloves from France:

The Queen said, 'That can't be :

If you go there for glove-making,

It is without the g.'"-FAIR ROSAMOND.

THE elder D'Israeli, in his sketch on the history of gloves, sets out by observing, that in the 108th Psalm, where the royal prophet declares he will cast his shoe over Edom, and in Ruth iv. 7, where the custom is noticed of a man taking off his shoe and giving it to a neighbour, as a pledge for redeeming or exchanging anything, the word shoe may in the latter, if not in both cases, mean glove. He adds, that Casaubon is of opinion that gloves were worn by the Chaldeans; and that in the Chaldee paraphrase of the book of Ruth, the word which we render as shoe or sandal, is explained in the Talmud lexicon as "the clothing of the hand." Here is a sad confusion of hands and feet, as much so as in the celebrated observation by Mrs. Ramsbottom, that she "had had a great deal of walking on her hands, lately."

The flinging down of a sandal upon a territory was a symbol of occupancy or possession. "Upon the land of Edom do I cast my shoe" (sandal), says the Psalmist, in the 9th Psalm. And this was a symbol of slavery to the Edomites, for to loose the sandal was the office of a slave; and in Egypt, especially, we find paintings of slaves who are carrying their master's sandals. On the sole of the latter was sometimes represented a captive, whom the wearer had the pleasure of thus pictorially treading underfoot. When an old shoe is thrown after a newly married couple, it does not so much imply that they have probably been put in possession of felicity, as that they have certainly lost their liberty.

Xenophon remarks that the Persians wore coarse clothes, fought bareheaded, and never required pocket-handkerchiefs. He laughs at them however for using gloves, and for effeminately covering their heads, when the latter might best dispense with the protection. Laertes, the Greek, wore gloves when he was gardening, in order to protect his fingers from the thorns;-and this shows that young Greek noblemen, in remote times, could occupy themselves usefully and innocently. Our youths, with much time, heavy purses, and a lordship of self, would find considerable profit in "putting on the gloves" for no worse purposes.

Gloves were not common among the Romans, but they were not entirely unknown. Varro says that to pluck olives without them was to spoil the olive; and Athenæus tells of a glutton who used to dine out in gloves, and so be enabled to dispose of the hot things quicker than the guests who were less prepared for the handling them. The fashion of gloves made its way however in Rome, in spite of the philosophers who affected to despise comfort, and did assuredly decline cleanliness. They were worn, for instance, by the secretary of the elder Pliny.

The mode seems to have been adopted in some excess y the monks, until a decree of the Council of Aix ordered that they should wear none but gloves of sheepskin. Had they turned their cilices into gloves, and made flesh-brushes of them, it would have been more profitable to themselves, and to all who stood near them. In France, the use of gloves was allowed only to bishops. They were sometimes used in great formalities of the "Church," and indeed of the State also; for bishops received investiture by presentation of a glove, and kings were not half crowned who did not receive a pair, with an episcopal blessing to enhance the gift.

Among the early English, the Anglo-Saxons, we find that ladies, before they knew the use of the glove, or applied their knowledge to its most convenient conclusion, had the ends of their mantles shaped into gloves, and these were worn over the hand, under the

name of mufflers. Gloves were worn by females before the Reformation, despite what Gough says to the contrary. A dishonoured knight was deprived not only of his spurs, but of his gloves also. It was right that the symbol for a gage of battle should be taken from him whose office it had been to carry arms, but who was no longer accounted as worthy of wielding them.

In Germany, he who entered a prince's stables, or was present at the killing of a stag, without taking off his gloves, had to pay his footing or fine; in the first case to the grooms, in the second to the huntsmen-and for this reason, because they could not mingle among grooms and huntsmen, and yet retain their dignity (asserted by keeping on the glove), without paying for it.

Gloves are distributed at funerals-perhaps originally as a challenge from the doctor, defying all who shall dare say that he had committed murder contrary to the rules of art. But they were acceptable presents on other occasions; and when gloves were rare, and James I. and Elizabeth gave those rich and rare articles as gifts to various members of the Denny family, no doubt the fingers of the latter felt the honour deeply.

When these gloves

were sold, some two centuries and a half later, a single pair fetched a price for which a man with judgment and taste might purchase a select library. One of this family, Sir William Denny himself, contributed a remarkable poetical work to the libraries of 1653, namely, the 'Pelecanicidium, or the Christian Adviser against Self-murder; together with a Guide, and a Pilgrim's Pass to the Land of the Living.' In the preface he says, "Mine ears do tingle to hear so many sad relations, as ever since March last, concerning several persons, of divers rank and quality, inhabiting within and about so eminent a city as late-famed London, that have made away and murdered themselves."

In England gloves came in about the time the Heptarchy went out. The exact period is not known; but we do know that when a society of German merchants sought protection for the trade which they carried on between their own country and England,

they propitiated King Ethelred II. by presenting him with five pairs of gloves: their not being able to muster the half-dozen shows the rarity of the article. In the case mentioned the gloves were probably not so much a gift or bribe, as a portion of duty paid in kind. Prior to this period the hands of both sexes were covered, as I before observed, by the mantles; and some persons with rapidly progressing ideas, had donned an imperfect structure which presented a stall for the thumb, and a sort of stocking foot for the rest of the fingers. They were like the mufflers which we place on the digits of young England; and when Mrs. Ramsbottom made the observation I quoted in the first paragraph, of "having had much walking on her hands lately," she may have had these very mufflers in her eye.

Gloves soon became fashionable among the higher classes; at least, Ordericus Vitalis tells us that when the Bishop of Durham escaped from the Tower, during the reign of Henry I., he had to slide down a rope; and as the bishop, in his hurry, had "forgotten his gloves," he rubbed the skin off his hands to the bone, in descending from the window. Duke Charles of Guise, when he escaped in a similar manner, from the Château at Tours, in the days of Henry III., had better fortune; he descended more leisurely than the bishop, being lighter, and with no further detriment than a rent in his hose.

Long before the period referred to by Ordericus, the French monks were the authorized glove-makers. They especially loved hunting, but respectability required that they should not love the sport merely for the sport's sake. Accordingly, Charlemagne granted to the monks of Sithin especially, unlimited right of hunting, because of the skins of the deer killed by them they made gloves and girdles, and covers for books. I have before noticed, that by a subsequent decree of the Council of Aix, in the time of Louis le Débonnaire, monks were forbidden to wear any gloves but those made of sheep-skin.

Gloves were popular new-year's gifts, or sometimes "glove

money" in place of them; occasionally, these gloves carried gold pieces in them. When Sir Thomas More was Chancellor, he decided a case in favour of Mrs. Croaker against Lord Arundel; the former on the following new-year's day, gratefully presented the judge with a pair of gloves with forty angels in them. "It would be against good manners," said the Chancellor, “to forsake a gentle-woman's new-year's gift, and I accept the gloves. The lining you will elsewhere bestow."

It will be remembered that St. Gudule had the faculty of being able, when her candle was extinguished, to blow it in again. Many among us enjoy the same faculty, and schoolboys often practise the miracle-the only one ever performed by St. Gudule. It is said however that when the saint prayed, barefooted, in church, the attendant priest, moved by compassion, put his gloves under her feet. They immediately rose, and hung in the air for a whole hour;-but what that proves, I really do not know.

But we have had gloves suspended in our own churches. When Bernard Gilpin was preaching in the North of England, he observed, on entering one of the churches there, a glove suspended from the roof; and having learned that it was a challenge placed there by a Borderer, in defiance of some other Borderer, he tore it down, to the great disgust of the sexton, who had a respect for established usages, even though the devil had invented them. Good Bernard Gilpin gave a challenge of his own from the pulpit, he flung down the Gospel before the rather angry people, who were highly civilized, and therefore averse to innovation; and he told them so defiantly of the difficulties in the way of their salvation, that they determined to surmount them and became a Christian people; and that, under correction, is a better glove, and a greater miracle, than those of St. Gudule.

I have spoken, in another page, of our old English custom of kissing. It is one which is not likely to decay. We still kiss persons caught napping—that is, if they be worth the kissingand exact as forfeit the price of a new pair of gloves. In old