to test the worth of her lover's vows, and who
received as her reward the glove flung
scornfully back into her face, with the applause of
king and court to the daring and disenchanted
lover. This is a story which has given two of
our best poets occasion for very lovely, if
differing, fancies: Leigh Hunt siding with the
lover and King Francis, and branding the lady
with the shame of heartless coquetry and most
unworthy pride; Browning taking, perhaps, the
nobler view, and maintaining it to have been a
mere test of truth and sincerity, which failed in
the application—to the bringing forth of a higher
joy. Then there is the monkish legend of Saint
Gudule, the patroness of Brussels, who flourished,
as the date books say, in the beginning of the
eighth century, and who one day came praying
in the church with naked feet; praying with
such fervour and with feet so naked, that a
charitable priest put his gloves under them for
shoes, to protect them from chilblains and the
damp of the stones. But Saint Gudule kicked
the gloves away, and went on with her prayers,
while the gloves hung suspended in the air for
upwards of an hour, to the great marvelling of
the beholders, and the testimony, by a miracle,
of the saint's true character beneath her cowl.
There is another older world story about gloves,
in the adventures of Asa Thor, on his way to
Jötunheim; and how, on his journey thither, he,
and Loki, and the swift young Thialfi who had
sucked the marrow of the goat's leg-bone, so that
the beast went lame for the rest of his natural
days—unnatural rather—how they all got lost
in a forest, and slept in a spacious hall, with a
smaller chamber branching off. Which hall they
found afterwards was nothing but the giant
Skrymir's glove, with the thumb, where they
had taken refuge from the wind, for the smaller
chamber. Then there were Thor's iron gloves,
without which he dared not attempt to grasp
his mighty hammer Mjölnir—gloves which we
may presume to have been a species of celestial
knuckle-dusters, as knuckle-dusters are our
nineteenth century version of the cesti which
the old Roman wrestlers and gladiators wore.
Indeed, iron gloves or gauntlets—those pieces
of armour which came in between the dagger
and the rerebrace; before the first and after
the last—were in use long before the peaceful
glove: "glof," the Anglo-Saxons called it, and
which were made at first unfingered, like
modern babies' mits, and the gloves of all rude
peoples everywhere. Were they the gauntlets
or the gloves which were taken from a recreant
knight when his spurs were hacked off and his
sword broken, and his knightly shield reversed,
in token of his having forfeited all claim to
honour and chivalrous belongings? When the
Earl of Carlisle was impeached in the second
Edward's reign, and condemned to die as a traitor,
for holding treasonable correspondence with the
Scots, "his spurs were cut off with a hatchet,
and his shoes and gloves were taken off:"
gloves or gauntlets? The old annalists are
seldom correct, accuracy being an intellectual
virtue of quite modern parentage.

There were some curious niceties about entering
into the presence of royalty with or without
gloves. "This week the Lord Coke, with his
gloves on, touched and kissed the king's hand,
but whether to be confirmed a councillor, or
cashiered, I cannot yet learn," said a letter in
the Court and Times of Charles I, published in
1625. It would seem more decorous to enter
the presence gloved; but perhaps there were
good reasons why not; something akin to
those which made it advisable to see the hands
of a judge at court, and those of a visitor to a
training stable just before running day.

In Burke's Vicissitudes there is a very curious
story of a glover-nobleman, William Maclellan,
sixth Lord Kirkcudbright, who was utterly
ruined, retaining nothing of his earldom save
the right to the name, and so became a glover
for his daily bread. He used to stand in the
lobby of the Edinburgh Assembly Rooms, in the
old town, selling gloves, which were then wanted
in greater profusion than now, it being the
etiquette to wear a new pair for each dance.
But the glove-seller was a lord nevertheless, and
an earl in his own right and by his father's; and,
more than this, he was the ancestor of that
General across the Atlantic who was to have
crushed the Southern Confederacy in ninety days
—but didn't do it, somehow. The son of the
glover-earl became a colonel, and eventually
won the recognition of his condition from
Parliament, May the 3rd, 1773. And there is
the epigram—or what would it be called in
scientific poetry books?—passing between the
lady and her aged lover, one Mr. Page, when
he sent her a glove with this distich pinned
to it:

If from glove you take the letter G,
Then Glove is Love, which I do send to thee.

And she answered him saucily with,

And if from Page you take the letter P,
Then Page is Age, and that won't do for me;

to the eternal confusion of the ancient Philander,
indignant at ridicule. Then, there are
Woodstock and its dusty, powdery, sheepskin gloves,
its traditions of Fair Rosamond, and its present
practical skill in leather-work; and the chicken
gloves of Limerick, not now to be had, packed
up in a walnut-shell, fastened with fairy ribbon,
and sold for five shillings the pair; and the
pocket gloves of a few years back, which had a
pocket in the palm, which opened when the
hand was closed, and shut when the hand was
opened; convenient enough for timid ladies who
carry their omnibus sixpence in the palm of the
hand slipped up inside the glove, but of no great
reputation among the public in general, and
dying out in a stifled asphyxiated kind of way.
And there are the "slipskins" of Switzerland
—the skins of young kids prematurely brought
into the world by some unholy practices of the
goatherds, and which, marvellously smooth and
fine, go to make very fine ladies' very fine
gloves. And there are all the old petitions and
remonstrances addressed to parliament against