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.”