GLOVES, B⸺S, 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 by the monks, until a decree of the Council of Aix ordered that they should wear none but gloves of sheep-skin. 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 or 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 Henri 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 gentlewoman’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 kissing,—and exact as forfeit the price of a new pair of gloves. In old days, he who first saw the new moon could, by kissing a maiden, and proclaiming the fact,—that is, the lunar fact,—claim a pair of gloves for his service. The Persian habit was to kiss only relatives, which must have been highly proper, but uncommonly insipid,—a perfect waste of good things, except among cousins.
Our Queen Elizabeth was a wearer of gloves that are said to have been of a very costly description. Shakspeare was once acting in her presence the part of a king—one of his own making; and so careful was he of the illusion of the scene, that he forgot all other things beside. The Virgin Queen resolved to put him to the proof; and as the mimic king passed before her, she dropped one of her gloves. Shakspeare, faithful subject as well as actor, immediately paused, and with the words that, “although bent on this high embassy, yet stoop we to pick up our cousin’s glove,” he presented it to the real queen, and then passed on. This anecdote is often cited to prove that nothing could induce the poet-actor to depart from the business of the stage; and it proves exactly the contrary; but as an illustration of gloves I have found it handy to my purpose.
Elizabeth treated Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, more generously than she did Shakspeare. The Queen gave him her glove, which, she having dropped it, he had picked up to return to her. He immediately adorned it with jewels, and placed it in his cap, where he displayed it at all jousts and tournaments. Chivalrous gentlemen at Donnybrook Fair follow something of this fashion when they draw a chalk line round their hat, and knock down every one bold enough to declare that it is not silver lace. Elizabeth, I may add, received as well as gave gloves. The first embroidered pair ever worn in England were presented to her by Vere, Earl of Oxford, when he returned from a mission abroad. The Queen had her portrait taken with the gloves introduced.
And speaking of embassies, recalls to my memory another story connected with gloves and legations. Ambassadors’ effects are passed without examination,—not by law, but out of courtesy. This courtesy has made smuggleresses of many an envoy’s wife; of none more than of a French Ambassadress, not very many years ago, in England. She used to import huge cases of gloves under the name of “despatches,” and these she condescended to sell to English ladies who were mean enough to buy them. But the custom-house officers became tired of being accomplices in this contraband trade, and they put a stop to it by a very ingenious contrivance. Having duly ascertained that a case directed to the Embassy contained nothing but ladies’ gloves, they affected to treat it as a letter which had been sent through the Customs by mistake, and which they made over to the Post-office. The authorities of the latter delivered the same in due course; the postage-fee of something like £250 was paid without a remark; and the Ambassadress stopped all further correspondence of that sort by declining to deal any longer in gloves.
But even the Customs get defeated occasionally, in spite of their cleverness. Some years ago a celebrated exporter of contraband goods, residing at Calais, sent on the same day, to two different parts of England, two cases of gloves, one containing gloves only for the right, the other case, gloves only for the left hand. The “left hands” got safely to their destination, but the “rights” were seized. The Customs however could find no purchaser at the usual sales for single gloves, but they were at last bought by an individual at the rate of a penny a dozen; this individual happened to be the possessor of the other single gloves, and he reaped a rich profit by the trick over the fair and honest dealer.
This was a more successful trick with the gloves than that practised by the lady who, flinging her pretty gauntlet on to the arena where some wild beasts were struggling, bade her knight descend and bring it back to her. The cavalier accomplished the task, but he smote the cruel damsel in the face with the glove ere he threw it at her feet; and, turning on his heel, he left her for ever. She of course lived on in single sullenness; and I warrant that she never saw white gloves and a wedding without a twinge at her heart.
The late Duke of Orléans was once almost as unlucky as this lady, and all through a glove. He was visiting some of the wounded of Antwerp in a hospital near the scene of conflict. He spoke kindly to all, and he shook hands with several; but one of those he so honoured bluntly remarked, that when the Emperor shook hands with the wounded he first drew off his gloves.
The Duke as much offended contra bonos mores by keeping his gloves on, as an old-fashioned naval captain once did by keeping them off. The marine hero in question had stood up to go through a country-dance with a very fine lady, who was shocked to observe that his huge and warm hands were not covered according to etiquette. “Captain,” said his fair partner, “you are perhaps not aware that you have not got your gloves on.” “Oh, never mind, Ma’am!” answered the commander, “never mind; I can wash my hands when we’ve done!” The gallant sailor was not as wide-awake to the advantages of opportunity for gallantry on the question of gloves as Yorick was when the grave gentleman flirted with the Calais grisette. He was no descendant—albeit his name was Harley—of that Earl of Oxford I have just named, who once presented Elizabeth with a pair of gloves, ornamented with four tufts of rose-coloured silk, so deliciously scented, that she called the scent “Lord Oxford’s perfume.”
London, Ludlow, and Leominster, Worcester, Woodstock, and Yeovil, are the great seats of the leather-glove manufacture in England. The Worcester district alone supplies six million pairs annually, and all, or nearly all, made by hand. Derby contributes silk gloves; the worsted come from Leicester; and Nottingham furnishes us with cotton gloves. In addition to these, we yearly import between three and four million pairs of leather gloves from France. The export of home-made gloves is very small,—not large enough to keep warm the fingers of the little republic of San Marino.
But a man, to be well dressed, must don something besides hat and gloves. I will not put one part of the necessary addition under a separate head; nor indeed will I mention its name, save in an anecdote. I will simply, by way of introduction, quote two salient sayings uttered by French moralists on the article in question.
The first is to the admonitory effect that “à la femme altière, méchante, impérieuse, on est tenté d’offrir une culotte.” The second is still more salubrious of character, and observance of it will prove highly efficacious. “Une femme qui porte les culottes,” says a melancholy and married philosopher, “ne peut marcher longtemps sans tomber.” And now to my promised anecdotes.
A gentleman once said, in defence of Shakspeare, that his vulgar characters, though low, were natural. Voltaire, to whom this was said, observed the advantage to be derived from such an assertion by one who, like himself, hated Shakspeare:—“Avec permission, mon derrière est bien dans la nature, et cependant je porte culotte.” This illustration reminds me of a stage pair of breeches, which, some eighty years ago, had wellnigh killed that fair and fairly-reputable actress, Miss Maria Macklin. She was famous for her male characters, and for her taste in dressing them; Dejazet has not a better taste in this respect. But Miss Macklin unfortunately had not only worn the male garment repeatedly, but she was in the habit of buckling the garter portion of it so tightly, that the result was a large and dangerous swelling in the knee, which, we are told by Kirkman and Cooke, “from motives of delicacy, she would not suffer to be examined till it had increased to an alarming size!” An operation however was successfully performed, and she bore it courageously; but she never regained her strength, and she died the victim of false delicacy and a little vanity.
But, false or not, her delicacy was very like that of Mary of Burgundy, who died in consequence of over-modesty, in concealing an injury in the thigh, caused by a fall from a horse. Mary’s husband, Maximilian, had his delicate scruples too,—that is, on one point—the point of putting on a shirt, which he would never do in the presence of a valet. The idea of doing what Louis XIV. so regularly did,—namely, put on a shirt, and that sometimes a rather dirty one, in presence of a roomful of people,—would have made the modest and moneyless Maximilian turn pale with disgust. Perhaps however Maximilian hated shirts, because they were not of German invention. Like the old gentleman in the ‘Wasps’ of Aristophanes, who, being desired to put on a pair of Lacedæmonian boots, excuses himself on the plea that one of his toes is πάνυ μισολάκωυ—altogether hostile to the Lacedæmonians; a bit of wit, by the way, which honest Sheridan has fitted on to the character of Acres, who hates French dancing terms for the reason that his feet don’t understand pas this and pas that; and that he decidedly has most “Anti-Gallican toes.” This expression is decidedly a plagiarism from the admirable low-comedy scene in the ‘Wasps,’ where good Master Bdelycleon so daintily dresses his father Philocleon, the Athenian Dicast, and gallantly compliments him at last, by comparing him to “a boil covered with garlic.”
The Aristophanic incident recalls to my memory one of a somewhat similar quality, which really occurred some years ago at Gosport. Mr. Joseph Gilbert, who had been attached to the astronomical service in Captain Cook’s expedition to observe the transit of Venus, and whose name was conferred by the great navigator on “Gilbert’s Island,” resided at Gosport; where, according to the fashion of the day, he, like the Count d’Artois, wore very tight leather breeches. He had ordered his tailor to attend on him one morning, when his granddaughter, who resided with him, had also ordered her shoemaker to wait upon her. The young lady was seated in the breakfast-room, when the maker of leather breeches was shown in; and, as she did not happen to know one handicraftsman more than the other, she at once intimated that she wished him to measure her for a pair of “leathers,” for, as she remarked, the wet weather was coming, and she felt cold in “cloth.” The modest tailor could hardly believe his ears. “Measure you, Miss?” said he with hesitation. “If you please,” said the young lady, who was remarkable for much gravity of deportment; “and I have only to beg that you will give me plenty of room, for I am a great walker, and I do not like to wear anything that constrains me.” “But, Miss,” exclaimed the poor fellow in great perplexity, “I never in my life measured a lady; I⸺” and there he paused. “Are you not a lady’s shoemaker?” was the query calmly put to him. “By no means, Miss,” said he; “I am a leather-breeches maker, and I have come to take measure not of you, but Mr. Gilbert.” The young lady became perplexed too, but she recovered her self-possession after a good common-sense laugh, and sent the maker of breeches to her grandpapa.
Rosemary-lane was not only of old, and under its name of Rag Fair, a great mart for cast-off garments, but especially, by some freak of ochlocratic fashion, for breeches. It has had the honour of being noticed by Pope as “a place near the Tower of London, where old clothes and frippery are sold;” and, says Pennant, “the articles of commerce by no means belie the name. There is no expressing the poverty of the goods, nor yet their cheapness. A distinguished merchant, engaged with a purchaser, observing me to look on him with great attention, called out to me, as his customer was going off with his bargain, to observe that man, ‘for,’ says he, ‘I have actually clothed him for fourteen pence.’” And in the ‘Public Advertiser’ for February 14, 1756, we read, as an incident of the locality “where wave the tattered ensigns of Rag Fair,” that “Thursday last one Mary Jenkins, who deals in old clothes in Rag Fair, sold a pair of breeches to an old woman for sevenpence and a pint of beer. Whilst they were drinking it in a public-house, the purchaser, in unripping the breeches, found quilted in the waistband eleven guineas in gold, Queen Anne’s coin, and a thirty-pound banknote, dated in 1729, which last she did not know the value of till after she sold it for a gallon of twopenny purl.”
To go a little further back, I may say that the Reformation had other results besides those usually recorded; thus that great event was no sooner accomplished than the brokers and sellers of old apparel took up their residence in Hounsditch, where their great enemy, the Spanish Ambassador, had previously had a residence. Their locality was then “a fair field, sometime belonging to the Priory of the Holy Trinity, at Aldgate.” “Where gott’st thou this coat, I mar’le,” says Wellbred to Brainworm, in Jonson’s ‘Every Man in his Humour.’ “Of a Houndsditch man, Sir,” answers Brainworm; “one of the devil’s near kinsmen, a broker.”
We have another portion of dress whose origin dates from a serious personage and from eventful times. I allude to that terror of gentlemen who do not possess that which frogs and properly-built men alone possess in common,—namely, calves;—I allude, I say, to “pantaloons.” This tight-fitting garment was once part of the official costume of the great standard-bearer of the Venetian Republic. He carried on his banner the Lion of St. Mark, and he was the Piantaleone, or Planter of the Lion, around whose glorious flag and tightly-encased legs the battle ever raged with greatest fury, and where victory was most hotly contended for. The tight parti-coloured legs of the tall Piantaleone were the rallying points of the Venetians. Where his thighs were upright, the banner was sure to be floating in defiance or triumph over them; and Venice may be said to have stood upon the legs of her Pantaloons. He who once saved states was subsequently represented as the most thoroughly battered imbecile of a pantomime. But therein was a political revenge. Harlequin, Clown, and Columbine represented different states of Italy, whose delight it was to pillory Venice by beating her nightly under the guise of the old buffoon “Signor Pantaloon.” The dress has survived the memory of this fact, though the dress too is almost obsolete.
In the last paragraph there is the phrase “I say” interpolated, the use of which reminds me of a tailor-like comment made upon it. Erskine writing to Boswell, or Boswell to Erskine, I forget now which, remarks that “a sentence so clumsily worded as to require an ‘I say’ to keep it together, very much resembles, in my candid opinion, a pair of ill-mended breeches.”
The article of braccæ is suggestive of buttons; and touching these, I may observe that there is a curious law extant with regard to them. It is, by Acts of Parliament passed in three reigns,—William III., Anne, and George I.,—perfectly illegal for tailor to make, or mortal man to wear, clothes with any other buttons appended thereto but buttons of brass. This law is in force for the benefit of the Birmingham makers; and it further enacts, not only that he who makes or sells garments with any but brass buttons thereto affixed, shall pay a penalty of forty shillings for every dozen, but that he shall not be able to recover the price he claims, if the wearer thinks proper to resist payment. Nor is the Act a dead letter. It is not many weeks since, that honest Mr. Shirley sued plain Mr. King for nine pounds sterling, due for a suit of clothes. King pleaded non-liability on the ground of an illegal transaction, the buttons on the garment supplied having been made of cloth, or bone covered with cloth, instead of gay and glittering brass, as the law directs. The judge allowed the plea; and the defendant having thus gained a double suit without cost, immediately proceeded against the defendant to recover his share of the forty shillings for every dozen buttons which the poor tailor had unwittingly supplied. A remarkable feature in the case was, that the judge who admitted the plea, the barrister who set it up, and the client who profited by it, were themselves all buttoned contrary to law!
If I were writing an Encyclopædia of Trades, I would be as elaborate as Dryasdust on the manufacture of buttons of all sorts of metal, more or less costly; of wood, bone, ivory, horn, leather, paper, glass, silk, wool, cotton, linen, thread, flock, compressed clay, etc. etc.—so that both my readers and myself have a lucky escape. As the age however is statistical in its inclinations, I will save my credit by remarking that at Birmingham, the chief seat of button-manufacture, there are not less than five thousand persons engaged in the manufacture of buttons, and that half this number consists of women, and children.
Having said this, I turn to a new chapter, wherein there will be something more of statistics, and something new about stockings.