“In contrast with the beauty and grandeur of the interior is the insignificant-looking bronze statue of what they call St. Peter, seated in a chair of white marble. Some one remarked that it had been in ancient times a statue of Jupiter. ‘Jupiter,’ I exclaimed, ‘the Jupiter of the old Romans? Never!’ While I stood wondering at the unaccountable vagaries of mankind in general, and of artists in particular, and of the meaning of the word taste, several persons passed along and kissed the foot of the statue, the toes of which are actually worn away with kissing, and the big toe, what is left of it, looks bright as gold....
“Crowds of people were walking round in the nave, looking at the pictures and statues; crowds stood at the gate of the chapel, looking in through the gate and railing, listening to the music; and all grades filed along by the statue of St. Peter, kneeling, then rising and kissing his toe. The peasants wiped off the toe with their hands or sleeves, and then kissed it; others carefully wiped it with their handkerchiefs both before and after kissing it.”
A KISS FOR A VOTE.
In a little work published in London in 1758, entitled “A New Geographical and Historical Grammar,” we find the following paragraph concerning bribery and kissing:
“The ladies may think it a hardship that they are neither allowed a place in the Senate nor a voice in the choice of what is called the representative of the nation. However, their influence appears to be such in many instances that they have no reason to complain. In boroughs the candidates are so wise as to apply chiefly to the wife.[11] A certain candidate for a Norfolk borough kissed the voters’ wives with guineas in his mouth, for which he was expelled the House; and for this reason others, I suppose, will be more private in their addresses to the ladies.”
Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, gave Steel, the butcher, a kiss for his vote nearly a century since; and another equally beautiful woman, Jane, Duchess of Gordon, recruited her regiment in a similar manner. Duncan Mackenzie, a veteran of Waterloo, who died at Elgin, Scotland, December, 1866, delighted in relating how he kissed the duchess in taking the shilling from between her teeth to become one of her regiment,—the Gordon Highlanders, better known as the Ninety-second. The old Scottish veteran of eighty-seven has not left one behind him to tell the same tale about kissing the blue-eyed duchess in the market-place of Duthill.
The late Daniel O’Connell hit upon a novel mode of securing votes for the candidates he had named at a certain election, which test, considering the constitutional temperament of his countrymen, is said to have proved effectual. He said, in reference to the unfortunate elector who should vote against them, “Let no man speak to him. Let no woman salute him!”