The English blade, I am sorry to say, has never been famous for excellence of temper. Some two centuries ago, an attempt was made to improve the home-manufactured sword, by incorporating a company of sword-cutlers for making hollow sword-blades, in Cumberland and the adjacent counties. The project failed, owing to the parsimony of the principals and the ignorance of the workmen. During the greater portion of the last century, our sword-blades were “regular bricks,” quite as blunt, but not half so dangerous. An English officer was as safe with one in his hand as if he had bought it at a toyshop; but he never met the enemy with a native-manufactured weapon. This state of things, and a mixed idea of profit and patriotism, fired Mr. Gill of Birmingham into experiments which became realities; and the English weapon was turned out as well calculated to help its wearer to cut through the sixth commandment as any foreign blade of them all.
A sword is only perfectly tempered at a heat of 550° Fahrenheit. The testing is by means of a process of bending and twisting almost torturing to read of. I only wish that all monarchs who unjustly draw the sword, were first subjected to the tempering and testing which the weapon itself undergoes. Could such a course have been applied to that miscreant Nicholas, what a relief it would have been to the world! An exposure, during ten minutes in an oven, to a heat of 550°, would have been followed by uncomplaining acquiescence on the part of the Czar; and there would not have been added to his account so many murders as those for which, as Heaven is just as well as merciful, he will be held responsible, at the tribunal which that gigantic criminal can not avoid.
The sword was grasped by hand, or mailed or gloved; and to the question of gloves we will now direct attention.
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.”