As to the custom of kissing the Pope’s toe, Matthew of Westminster writes that it was customary at one time to kiss the hand of His Holiness, but that a certain woman in the eighth century not only kissed the Pope’s hand, but squeezed it. The Pope, seeing the danger to which he was exposed, cut off his hand, and afterwards offered his foot.
But another authority says that kissing the Pope’s toe was a fashion introduced by one of the Leos, who had mutilated his right hand and was too vain to expose the stump.
In Charles Reade’s “Cloister and the Hearth,” there is a short dissertation on some curious kissing customs. Fra Colonna, enamored of the pagan days, overwhelms Brother Jerome with copious quotations, showing the antiquity and pagan origin of many modern ecclesiastical customs. “Kissing of images and the Pope’s toe is Eastern paganism,” said Fra Colonna. “The Egyptians had it of the Assyrians, the Greeks of the Egyptians, and we of the Romans, whose Pontifax Maximus had his toe kissed under the Empire. The Druids kissed their High Priest’s toe a thousand years B.C. The Mussulmans who, like you, professed to abhor heathenism, kissed the stone of the Caaba—a pagan practice. The priests of Baal kissed their idols.”
Kissing the foot, or the toe, has been required by the popes as a sign of respect since the eighth century. The first to receive the honor was Constantine. It was paid to him by the Emperor Justinian II. on his entry into Constantinople 710. About 827 Valentine I. required every one to kiss his foot, and from that time this mark of reverence has been expected. The Pope wears a slipper with a cross, which is kissed. In recent times Protestants have not been required to perform the ceremony, but to bend the knee slightly. When the excommunicated German emperor, Henry IV., had been humbled by three days of penance, barefoot, and fasting, in the month of January, before the palace of Pope Gregory VII., he was admitted to “the superlative honor” of kissing the pontiff’s toe.
Kissing the feet of princes was a token of subjection which was sometimes carried so far that the print of the foot received the kiss, so as to give the impression that the very dust had become sacred by the royal tread, or that the subject was not worthy to salute even the prince’s foot, but was content to kiss the earth itself near, or on which he trod. The Bible says:
“And kings shall be thy nursing fathers, and their queens thy nursing mothers; they shall bow down to thee with their face toward the earth, and lick up the dust of thy feet, and thou shalt know that I am the Lord, for they shall not be ashamed that wait for me.”—(Isaiah xlix. 23.)
“They shall lick the dust like a serpent, they shall move out of their holes like worms of the earth; they shall be afraid of the Lord our God and shall fear because of thee.”—(Micah, vii. 17.)
Kisses have been the reward of genius, as when Voltaire was publicly kissed in the stage-box by the young and lovely Duchess de Villars, who was ordered by an enthusiastic pit thus to reward the author of “Merope.” In politics they have been used as bribes, as in the famous Eatanswill elections of the “Pickwick Papers,” and also in a still more famous election. For, when Fox was contesting the hard-won seat at Westminster, the beautiful Duchess of Devonshire offered to kiss all who voted for the great statesman. And fully as famous, and perhaps in a better cause, was the self-denying patriotism of the beautiful Lady Gordon, who, when the ranks of the Scottish regiments had been sadly thinned by cruel Badajoz and Salamanca, turned recruiting sergeant, and, to tempt the gallant lads, placed the recruiting shilling in her lips, from whence who would might take it with his own.
In England, during the last century, a certain candidate for a Norfolk borough kissed the voters’ wives with guineas in his mouth, for which he was expelled the House. Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, gave Steel, the butcher, a kiss for his vote nearly a century since.
There have been bargains for kisses. A French poet speaks of a country girl who required “thirty sheep for one short kiss.” The shepherd thought the bargain a good one, but the next day he was agreeably astonished at being able to get from the same girl thirty kisses for one sheep. And then