When the Ghost appeared, Hamlet’s hat fell off; and this so excited

the commiseration of the damsel from Chiswick that she gently stepped

forward, picked up the hat, and with her own hands placed it upon

Holland’s head, with the broad corner foremost, as it might have been

worn had Hamlet been exceedingly drunk. Holland gravely finished the

scene, but his appearance was too much for the gravity of the house; and

although the audience, becomingly but with difficulty, restrained their

risibility till the young prince with the queer hat and his respected

sire’s ghost had diversely departed, they burst out into so uproarious

a laugh _then_, that the whole house rang again; and Holland too when

he was led to a glass, and contemplated his own counterfeit and highly

ridiculous presentment.

Such was a hat on the English stage; here is one on that of America.

Mr. Charles Kean, when once playing Richard, at New Orleans, observed,

as he was seated on the throne, and the curtain was rising, that his

noble peers wore their hats or caps in his presence. With his truncheon

to his lips he contrived a stage whisper, which said, “Take off your

hats; you are in the presence of the king.” “And what of that?” roared

high-reaching Buckingham, looking round at the audience, and smacking his

own cap tighter on his circumspect head; “what of that? I guess we know

nothing of kings in this country.” The New Orleaners were in raptures,

and the king sat corrected.

In old days there was not only a fashion in the hat, but also in the cock

of it. The famous battle of Ramilies introduced the Ramilies cock of the

hat. In No. 526 of the ‘Spectator,’ “John Sly, a haberdasher of hats,

and tobacconist,” is directed to take down the names of such country

gentlemen as have left the hunting for the military cock, before the

approach of peace. In a subsequent number is told how the same John Sly

is preparing hats for the several kinds of heads that make figures in

the realm of Great Britain, with cocks significant of their powers and

faculties. His hats for men of the faculties of law and physic do but

just turn up to give a little life to their sagacity. His military hats

glare full in the face; and he has prepared a familiar easy cock for all

good companions between the above-mentioned extremes.

Admiring mothers would sooner have followed their sons to the grave than

see them walk about with hats uncocked,—whether the form took that of

a spout or the point of a mince-pie. The German _Kevenhüller_ came on

about the accession of George III. They were as tasteless as those French

_chapeaux à cornes_, of whom Mr. Bob Fudge says that he

“would back Mrs. Draper

To cut better weather-boards out of brown paper.”

At this time, we are told, there was the military cock and the mercantile

cock; and while the beaux of St. James’s wore their hats under their

arms, the beaux of Moorfields Mall wore them diagonally over their left

or right eye. Some wore their hats with the corners which should come

over their foreheads, in a direct line, pointed into the air. These were

the Gawkies. Others did not above half cover their heads, which was

indeed owing to the shallowness of their crowns. A hat with gold binding

bespoke a man given to the pleasures of the turf. The tiny Nivernois hat

came into fashion early in the reign of the third George; and it is said

that gold-laced cocked hats used to be worn in the year ’78, because they

had a military look with them, and would therefore protect the wearer

against the press-gangs that were then more than usually active.

When round hats came in, at first merely for morning or undress wear,

but finally became a _fait accompli_, like that other little matter, the

French Revolution, all the young wearers of them (and there were, at

first, no others) were denounced as “blackguards” and “highwaymen.” The

youthful votaries of fashion retorted by nicknaming the three-cornered

hats, as “Egham, Staines, and Windsor,” in allusion to the three-fingered

road-post pointing in that tripartite direction. The flat, folding,

crescent-shaped beaver, called a cocked or an opera hat, was still to be

seen as late as 1818; and a party of gentlemen returning on foot from

Almack’s on a summer’s morning, with pantaloons tight as the Venetian

standard-bearer’s, and hats cocked according to the mode, presented a

rather martial look. Since that time, the round hat has gained headway;

even coachmen only wear the old cocked covering on state occasions; and

the ugliest article that ever could be devised for the purpose seems to

be planted upon our unwilling brows for ever.

In New, as formerly in Old, England, Quakers objected to take off their

hats. A judge in the former locality once remarked thereon, that if

he thought there was any religion in a hat, he would have the largest

he could purchase for money. Poor Essex, at his mock trial before his

enemies in Elizabeth’s palace, was compelled to stand uncovered. He

was so embarrassed with his hat and the papers in it, that he forgot

something of what he had to say; and perhaps too much care for his hat

helped him to lose his head.

Finally, do my readers know why “beaver” was the originally favourite

material for a hat? Dr. Marius was told by a Jew physician of Ulm, that

it was because by wearing a cap of beaver’s fur, anointing the head

once a month with oil of castor, and taking two or three ounces of it

in a year, a man’s memory may be so strengthened that he will remember

everything he reads. I would eschew French velvet, and would stick to

beaver, if I thought _that_.

And now as hats were put upon heads, the next fashion that will naturally

come under our notice is the fashion of Wigs and their Wearers. Previous

to turning to which, I may mention, by way of being useful, that “beaver”

is not beaver in our days; and that perhaps is why we are all so

forgetful of our duties. English beaver is a mixture of lamb’s wool and

rabbit’s fur. Silk, satin, and velvet hats are made of plush, woven for

the most part in the north of England. _Paris_ hats are made in London

from French plush, of which we import annually about 150,000 lbs. We

export few hats except to our own colonies. They are chiefly made, like

our wigs, for native wear.

WIGS AND THEIR WEARERS.

“Wigs were to protect obstinate old heads from the rays of

truth.”—ANONYMOUS AUTHOR.

When it is said that Hadrian was the first Roman Emperor who wore a wig,

nothing more is meant than that he was the first who avowedly wore one.

They were common enough before his time. Caligula and Messalina put them

on, for purposes of disguise, when they were abroad at night; and Otho

condescended to conceal his baldness with what he fain hoped his subjects

would accept as a natural head of hair belonging to one who bore the name

of Cæsar.

As for the origin of wigs, the honour of the invention is attributed to

the luxurious Iapygians, in Southern Italy. The Louvain theologians, who

published a French version of the Bible, affected however to discover the

first mention of perukes in a passage in the fourth chapter of Isaiah.

The Vulgate has these words:—“Decalvabit Dominus verticem filiarum Sion,

et Dominus crinem earum nudabit.” This the Louvain gentlemen translated

into French as follows:—“Le Seigneur déchevelera les têtes des filles de

Sion; et le Seigneur découvrira leurs perruques.” The which, done into

English, implies that “The Lord will pluck the hair from the heads of the

daughters of Sion, and will expose their periwigs.” My fair friend, you

would perhaps fling your own in my face were I to presume to tell you

what the true reading is.

In the above free-and-easy translation, the theologians in question

followed no less an authority than St. Paulinus of Nola, and thus had

respectable warrant for their singular mistake.

Allusions to wigs are frequently made both by the historians and poets

of ancient times. We know that they were worn by fashionable gentlemen

in Palmyra and Baalbec, and that the Lycians took to them out of

necessity. When their conqueror, Mausoleus, had ruthlessly ordered all

their heads to be shaven, the poor Lycians felt themselves so supremely

ridiculous, that they induced the king’s general Condalus, by means of an

irresistible bribe, to permit them to import wigs from Greece; and the

symbol of their degradation became the very pink of Lycian fashion.

Hannibal was a stout soldier, but on the article of perukes he was as

finical as Jessamy in ‘Lionel and Clarissa,’ and as particular as Dr.

Hoadley’s Ranger,—as nice about their fashion as the former, and as

philosophical as the latter on their look. Hannibal wore them sometimes

to improve, sometimes to disguise, his person; and if he wore one long

enough to spoil its beauty, he was as glad as the airy gentleman in ‘The

Suspicious Husband,’ to fling it aside when it wore a battered aspect.

Ovid and Martial celebrate the gold-coloured wigs of Germany. The latter

writer is very severe on the dandies and coquettes of his day, who

thought to win attraction under a wig. Propertius, who could describe so

tenderly and appreciate so well what was lovely in girlhood, whips his

butterflies into dragons at the bare idea of a nymph in a _toupet_. Venus

Anadyomene herself would have had no charms for that gentle sigher of

sweet and enervating sounds, had she wooed him in borrowed hair. If he

was not particular touching morals, he was very strict concerning curls.

If the classical poets winged their satirical shafts against wigs, these

were as little spared by the mimic thunderbolts of the Fathers, Councils,

and Canons of the early Church. Even poets and Christian elders could

no more digest human hair than can the crocodile,—of whom, dead, it is

said, you may know how many individuals he devoured living by the number

of hair-balls in the stomach, which can neither digest nor eject them.

The indignation of Tertullian respecting these said wigs is something

perfectly terrific. Not less is that of St. Gregory of Nazianzus, who

especially vouches for the virtue of his simple sister Gorgonia, for the

reason that she neither cared to curl her own hair, nor to repair its

lack of beauty by the aid of a wig. The thunder of St. Jerome against

these adornments was quite as loud as that of any of the Fathers. They

were preached against as unbecoming to Christianity. Council after

Council, from the first at Constantinople to the last Provincial Council

at Tours, denounced wigs even when worn in joke. “There is no joke in

the matter!” exclaimed the exceedingly irate St. Bernard; “the woman

who wears a wig commits a mortal sin!” St. John Chrysostom cites St.

Paul against the fashion, arguing that they who prayed or preached in

wigs could not be said to worship or to teach the Word of God “with head

uncovered.” “Look!” says Cyprian to the wearers of false hair; “look at

the Pagans! they pray in veils. What better are you than Pagans if you

come to prayers in perukes?” Many local Synods would authorize no fashion

of wearing the hair but straight and short. This form was especially

enjoined on the clergy generally. St. Ambrose as strictly enjoined the

fashion upon the ladies of his diocese: “Do not talk to me of curls,”

said this hard-working prelate; “they are the _lenocinia formæ, non

præcepta virtutis_.” The ladies smiled. It was to some such obdurate and

beautiful rebels that Cyprian once gravely preached, saying: “Give heed

to me, O ye women! Adultery is a grievous sin; but she who wears false

hair is guilty of a greater.”

It must have been a comfortable state of society when two angry ladies

could exclaim to each other, “You may say of me what you please; you may

charge me with breaking the seventh commandment; but, thank Heaven and

Cyprian, you cannot accuse me of wearing a wig!”

No pains were spared to deter women from this enormity. St. Jerome holds

up the fate of Prætexta as a warning to all ladies addicted to the

fashion of the world. Prætexta was a very respectable lady, married to

a somewhat paganish husband, Hymetius. Their niece, Eustochia, resided

with them. At the instigation of the husband, Prætexta took the shy

Eustochia in hand, attired her in a splendid dress, and covered her

fair neck with ringlets. Having enjoyed the sight of the modest maiden

so attired, Prætexta went to bed. To that bedside immediately descended

an angel, with wrath upon his brow, and billows of angry sounds rolling

from his lips. “Thou hast,” said the spirit, “obeyed thy husband rather

than the Lord, and hast dared to deck the hair of a virgin, and made her

look like a daughter of earth. For this do I wither up thy hands, and bid

them recognize the enormity of thy crime in the amount of thy anguish

and bodily suffering. Five months more shalt thou live, and then Hell

shall be thy portion; and if thou art bold enough to touch the head of

Eustochia again, thy husband and thy children shall die even before thee.”

St. Jerome pledges himself for the truth of this story, which is

exceedingly perplexing and utterly unintelligible.

The ladies were more difficult of management than the clergy. The former

were not to be terrified by the assurance, that breaking an ordinance of

men was a worse crime than breaking one of the commandments of God. The

hair of the clergy was kept straight, by decree of forfeiture of revenues

or benefice against incumbents who approached the altars with curls even

of their natural hair. Pomades and scented waters were denounced as

damnable inventions; but anathema was uttered against the priest guilty

of wearing one single hair combed up above its fellows. The well-curled

Bishop of Oxford would have been in the olden time _ipso facto_, because

of being so curled, excommunicated,—according to the decree of the

Council of Lateran (Gregory II.), which says:—“Cuicumque ex clericis

comam relaxaverit, anathema sit!”

“All personal disguise,” says Tertullian, “is adultery before God. All

perukes, paint, and powder are such disguises, and inventions of the

devil;” _ergo_, etc. This zealous individual appeals to personal as often

as to religious feeling. “If you will not fling away your false hair,”

says he, “as hateful to Heaven, cannot I make it hateful to yourselves,

by reminding you that the false hair you wear may have come not only

from a criminal but from a very dirty head, perhaps from the head of one

already damned?”

This was a very hard hit indeed; but it was not nearly so clever a stroke

at wigs as that dealt by Clemens of Alexandria. The latter informed the

astounded wig-wearers that, when they knelt at church to receive the

blessing, they must be good enough to recollect that the benediction

remained on the wig, and did not pass through to the wearer! This was a

stumbling-block to the people; many of whom however retained the peruke,

and took their chance as to the percolating through it of the benediction.

On similarly obstinate people, Tertullian railed with a hasty charge of

ill-prepared logic. “You were not born with wigs,” said he; “God did not

give them to you. God not giving them, you must necessarily have received

them from the devil.” It was manifest that so rickety a syllogism was

incapable of shaking the lightest _scratch_ from a reasoning Christian’s

skull. Indeed the logic of Tertullian, when levied against wigs, is

exceedingly faulty. Men of the world he points out as being given to

over-scrupulous cleanliness. Your _saint_ is dirty from an impulse of

duty; were he otherwise, he might be too seductive to the weaker sex.

This reminds me of the monk of Prague who was blind, but he had so fine

a nose that he was able to distinguish between a saint and a sinner by

the smell!

Not only were the Scriptures pressed into service against those who wore

false hair or dyed their own, but zealous Christian priests quoted even

heathen writers to shame men out of the custom. It is a remarkable thing

how well acquainted these well-meaning, but somewhat over-straining,

personages were with the erotic poets of heathendom.

Before the period of the Conquest, ecclesiastics were hardly

distinguishable from the laity except by the tonsure; and of this they

seem to have been partly ashamed, for they concealed it, to the best of

their ability, by brushing the long hair around it, so as to cover the

distinctive mark. It was only the great dignitaries who wore beards:

had a poor priest ventured to carry one on his face, he would have had

the one pulled and the other slapped by his ecclesiastical superiors.

The inferior clergy cared nothing about the matter till beards were

interdicted, as far as _they_ were concerned; and when the Council

of Limoges, in 1031, decreed that the wearing of the beard was to be

entirely optional, all concerned lost all concern in the question.

Desire had only fastened itself upon what was forbidden. As for the more

dignified clergy of the period, they were the most splendid dressers of

the day; and the greatest “dandies” were those who officiated at the

altar. No censure directed against their extravagance in this respect

had any effect upon them. It was only when the reproof seemingly came

from Heaven that they cared for it; as in the case of the young soldier

in the army of Stephen, who was intensely vain of the locks which fell

from his crown to his knees, and which he suddenly cut off close to the

roots, in consequence of dreaming that the devil was strangling him with

his own luxuriant ringlets. The dream did not cure other fops. In the

days of King John, our excellent fathers actually curled their hair with

crisping irons, and bound their locks with fillets, like girls. They

went bareheaded lest the beauty of their curls should be disturbed by a

cap; and they were not at all the sort of men that we should suspect of

having wrung Magna Charta from the King;—that Magna Charta the original

copy of which once fell into the hands of a tailor, who was cutting it up

into other measures for men, when it was rescued, not without difficulty,

and consigned to its present safe custody in the British Museum.

English _ladies_ (despite the fact that English lords cherished wigs

even in the days of Stephen) do not appear to have adopted the fashion

of wearing wigs until about the year 1550. Junius, in his ‘Commentarium

de Comâ,’ says that false hair came into use here with the ladies about

that time, and that such use had never before been adopted by English

matrons. Some three hundred years before this, the Benedictine monks

at Canterbury, who were canons of the cathedral, very pathetically

represented to Pope Innocent IV. that they were subject to catch very

bad colds from serving in the wide and chilly cathedral bareheaded. The

Pontiff gave them solemn permission to guard against cathedral rheum,

bronchitis, and phthisis, by covering their heads with the hood common

to their order; bidding them have especial care however to fling back

the hood at the reading of the Gospel, and at the elevation of the host.

Zealous churchmen have been very indignant at the attempts made to prove

that the permission of Innocent IV. might be construed as a concession

to priests, allowing them to wear wigs if they were so minded. The

question was settled at the Great Council of England, held in London

in 1268. That Council refused to sanction the wearing by clerics of

“quas vulgo _coifas_ vocant,” except when they were travelling. If a

coif even was profane, a wig to this Council would have taken the guise

of the unpardonable sin. It is, however, well known that although Rome

forbade a priest to officiate with covered head, permission to do so

was purchaseable. In fact, the rule of Rome was not founded, as it was

asserted to be, on Scripture. Permission was readily granted to the

Romish priests in China to officiate with covered heads, as being more

agreeable to the native idea there of what was seemly.

Native sentiment nearer home was much less regarded. Thus, when the

Bulgarians complained to Pope Nicholas, that their priests would not

permit them to wear, during church-time, those head-wrappers, or turbans,

which it was their habit never to throw off, the Pontiff returned an

answer which almost took the brief and popular form of “Serve you right!”

and the Bulgarians, on the other hand, took nothing by their motion.

Our Anselm of Canterbury was as little conceding to the young and

long-haired nobles of his day as was Pope Nicholas to the Bulgarians.

Eadmer, a monk of Canterbury, relates that on one occasion (Ash

Wednesday) the Primate soundly rebuked the hirsute aristocracy, put them

in penance, and refused them absolution, until they had submitted to

be close shorn. The prelate in question would allow none to enter his

cathedral who wore either long or false hair.

Against both the objection remained for a lengthened period insuperable.

When Henry I. of England was in France, Sirron, Bishop of Séez, told him

that Heaven was disgusted at the aspect of Christians in long hair, or

who wore on manly heads locks that perhaps originally came from female

brows. They were, he said, sons of Belial for so offending:—“Pervicaces

filii Belial, capita sua cornis mulierum ornata.”

The King looked grave: the prelate insinuatingly invited the father of

his people, who wore long if not false hair, to set a worthy example.

“We’ll think of it,” said the sovereign. “No time like the present,”

replied the prelate, who produced a pair of scissors from his episcopal

sleeve, and advanced towards Henry, prepared to sweep off those honours

which the monarch would fain have preserved. But what was the sceptre

of the prince to the forceps of the priest? The former meekly sat down

at the entrance of his tent, while Bishop Sirron clipped him with the

skilful alacrity of Figaro. Noble after noble submitted to the same

operation; and, while these were being docked by the more dignified

clergy, a host of inferior ecclesiastics passed through the ranks of the

grinning soldiers, and cut off hair enough to have made the fortunes of

all the periwig builders who rolled in gilded chariots during the palmy

days of the _Grand Monarque_.

In what then but in profligate days could wigs have triumphed in England?

Periwigs established themselves victoriously (dividing even the Church)

under Louis XIV. When a boy, that king had such long and beautiful hair,

that a fashion ensued for all classes to wear at least an imitation

thereof. When Louis began to lose his own, he also took to false

adornment; and full-bottomed wigs bade defiance to the canons of the

Church.

Charles II. did not bring the fashion with him to Whitehall. On the

contrary, he withstood it. He forbade the members of the University to

wear periwigs, smoke tobacco, or read their sermons. The members did all

three, and Charles soon found himself doing the first two. “On the 2nd

November, 1663,” says Pepys, “I heard the Duke say, that he was going to

wear a periwig; and they say the King also will. I never till this day,”

he adds, “observed that the King was so mighty grey.” This perhaps was

the reason why Charles stooped to assume what he had before denounced.

Pepys himself had adventured on the step in the previous May; and what a

business it was for the little man! Hear him. “8th. At Mr. Jervas’s, my

old barber. I did try two or three borders and periwigs, meaning to wear

one; and yet I have no stomach for it; but that the pains of keeping

my hair clean is so great. He trimmed me, and at last I parted; but my

mind was almost altered from my first purpose, from the trouble which I

foresee will be in wearing them also.” He took some time to make up his

mind; and only in October of the same year does he take poor Mrs. Pepys

“to my periwig maker’s, and there showed my wife the periwig made for me,

and she likes it very well.”

In April, 1665, the wig was in the hands of Jervas, under repair. In

the meantime, our old friend took to his natural hair; but early in

May we find him recording, “that this day, after I had suffered my own

hayre to grow long, in order to wearing it, I find the convenience of

periwigs is so great, that I have cut off all short again, and will

keep to periwigs.” In the autumn, on Sunday the 3rd of September, the

wicked little gallant moralizes thus on periwigs and their prospects.

“Up, and put on my coloured silk suit, very fine, and my new periwig,

bought a good while since, but durst not wear, because the plague was

in Westminster when I bought it; and it is a wonder what will be the

fashion, after the plague is done, as to periwigs, for nobody will dare

to buy any hayre for fear of the infection, that it had been cut off

the heads of people dead of the plague.” The plague and fear thereof

were clean forgotten before many months had passed; and in June, 1666,

Pepys says:—“Walking in the galleries at Whitehall, I find the ladies of

honour dressed in their riding-garbs, with coats and doublets with deep

skirts, just for all the world like mine; and buttoned their doublets

up their breasts, with periwigs and with hats. So that only for a long

petticoat dragging under their men’s coats, nobody could take them for

women in any point whatever; which was an odd sight, and a sight that

did not please me.” The moralist at Whitehall, however, could forget

his mission when at “Mercer’s.” There, on the 14th of August, 1666, the

thanksgiving day for the recent naval victory, after “hearing a piece of

the Dean of Westminster’s sermon,” dining merrily, enjoying the sport at

the Bear Garden, and letting off fireworks, the periwig philosopher, with

his wife, Lady Penn, Pegg and Nan Wright, kept it up at Mrs. Mercer’s

after midnight; “and there, mighty merry, smutting one another with

candle-grease and soot, until most of us were like devils. And that being

done, then we broke up, and to my house, and there I made them drink; and

up stairs we went and then fell into dancing, W. Battelier dancing well;

and dressing him and I, and one Mr. Banister, who, with my wife, came

over also with us, like women; and Mercer put on a suit of Tom’s, like a

boy. And Mr. Wright, and my wife, and Pegg Penn put on periwigs, and thus

we spent till three or four in the morning, mighty merry;”—and little

troubled with the thought whether the skull which had afforded the hair

for such periwig were lying in the pest-fields or not.

By the following year, our rising gentleman grows extravagant in his

outlay for such adornments; and he who had been content to wear a wig at

23_s._ buys now a pair for £4. 10_s._,—“mighty fine; indeed too fine,

I thought, for me.” And yet, amazingly proud was the macaroni of his

purchase, recording two days afterwards, that he had been “to church,

and, with my mourning, very handsome; and new periwig made a great show.”

Doubtless, under James II., his periwigged pate made a still greater

show; for then had wigs become stupendous in their architecture. The

beaux who stood beneath them, as I have stated in another page, carried

exquisite combs in their ample pockets, with which, whether in the Mall,

at the rout, in the private box, or engaged in the laborious work of

“making love,” they ever and anon combed their periwigs, and rendered

themselves irresistible.

Even at that period, Wisdom was thought to be beneath the Wig. “A full

wig,” says Farquhar in his ‘Love and a Bottle’ (1698), “is as infallible

a token of wit as the laurel;” an assertion which I should never think of

disputing.

Tillotson is the first of our clergy represented in a wig, and _that_

a mere substitute for the natural head of hair. “I can remember,” he

says, in one of his sermons, “since the wearing of the hair below the

ears was looked upon as a sin of the first magnitude; and when ministers

generally, whatever their text was, did either find or make occasion

to reprove the great sin of long hair; and if they saw any one in the

congregation guilty in that kind, they would point him out particularly,

and _let fly at him_ with great zeal.”

The victory of Ramilies introduced the Ramilies wig, with its peculiar,

gradually diminishing, plaited tail, and tie, consisting of a great bow

at top, and a smaller one at the bottom. This wig survived till the reign

of George III. The macaronis of 1729 wore “a macaw-like toupee and a

portentous tail.” But when the French Revolution came in contact with any

system,—from the German Empire to perukes,—that system perished in the

collision. So periwigs ceased, like the dynasty of the Doges of Venice;

and all that remains to remind us of by-gone glories in the former way,

is to be found in the Ramilies tie, which still clings to court coats,

though the wigs have fallen from the head, never again to rise.

Lady Wortley Montague makes a severe remark in her letters, less against

wigs indeed than their wearers. She is alluding to an alleged custom

in the East of branding every convicted liar on the forehead; and she

smartly adds, that if such a custom prevailed in England, the entire

world of beaux here would have to pull their periwigs down to their

eyebrows.

Tillotson, as I have noticed above, makes reference to the opposition

which perukes met with from the pulpit. The hostility from that quarter

in England was faint, compared with the fiery antagonism which blazed

in France. In the latter country, the privilege of wearing long hair

belonged, at one time, solely to royalty. Lombard, Bishop of Paris,

in the middle of the twelfth century induced royalty not to make the

privilege common, but to abolish it altogether. The French monarchs wore

their own hair cut short, until the reign of Louis XIII., who was the

first King of France who wore a wig. To the fashion set by him is owing

that France ultimately became the paradise of perruquiers.

In 1660, they first appeared on the heads of a few dandy abbés. As

Ireland, in Edward Dwyer, or “Edward of the Wig,” has preserved the

memory of the first of her sons who took to a periwig, so France has

handed down the Abbé de la Rivière, who died Bishop of Langres, as being

the ecclesiastical innovator on whose head first rested a wig, with

all the consequences of such guilty outrage of canonical discipline.

The indignation of strict churchmen was extreme; and as the fashion

began to spread amongst prelates, canons, and curés, the Bishop of

Toul sat himself down and wrote a “blast” against perukes, the wearing

of which, he said, unchristianized those who adopted the fashion. It

was even solemnly announced that a man had better not pray at all than

pray with his head so covered. No profanity was intended when zealous,

close-cropped, and bareheaded ecclesiastics reminded their bewigged

brethren, that they were bound to imitate Christ in all things; and then

asked them, if the Saviour were likely to recognize a resemblance to

himself in a priest under a wig.

Nor was this feeling confined to the Romish Church in France. The

Reformed Church was fully as hostile against the new and detested

fashion. Bordeaux was in a state of insurrection, for no other reason

than that the Calvinist pastor there had refused to admit any of his

flock in wigs to the sacrament. And when Riviers, Protestant Professor of

Theology at Leyden, wrote his ‘Libertas Christiana circa Usum Capillitii

Defensa’ in behalf of perukes, the ultra-orthodox in both churches

turned to gore him. The Romanists asked, what could be expected from a

Protestant but rank heresy? and the Protestants disowned a brother who

defended a fashion which had originated with a Romanist. Each party stood

by the words of Paul to the Corinthians. In vain did some suggest that

the apostolical injunction was only local. The ultras would heed no such

suggestion, and would have insisted on bare heads at both poles.

“And yet,” remarked the wiggites, “it is common for preachers to preach

in caps.” “Ay,” retorted the orthodox, “but that is simply because they

are then speaking only in their own name. Reading the Gospel or offering

up the adorable sacrifice, they are speaking or acting in the name of the

Universal Church. Of course,” they added, “there are occasions when even

a priest may be covered. If a Pope invented the _baret_, a curé may wear

a cap.”

Sylvester was the first Pontiff who wore a mitre, but even that fashion

became abused; and in the year 1000 a Pope was seen with his mitre on

during mass,—a sight which startled the faithful, and a fact which

artists would be none the worse for remembering. _After_ that period,

bishops took to them so pertinaciously that they hardly laid them by

on going to bed. These prelates were somewhat scandalized, when the

Popes granted to certain dukes the privilege of wearing the mitre; but

when the like favour was granted to abbots of a peculiar class, the

prelatic execration was uttered with a jealous warmth that was perfectly

astounding.

When the moderns brought the question back to its simple principles,

and asked the sticklers for old customs if wigs were not as harmless

as mitres, they were treated with as scant courtesy as Mr. Gorham or

the Lord Primate is in the habit of experiencing at the hands of a

“mediæval” bishop. If, it was said, a priest must even take off his

_calotte_ in presence of a king or Pope, how may he dare to wear a wig

before God? Richelieu was the first ecclesiastic of his rank in France

who wore the modern _calotte_; but I very much doubt if he ever took it

off in the presence of Louis XIII. It is known however that the French

King’s ambassador, M. d’Oppeville, found much difficulty in obtaining

an audience at Rome. He wore a wig _à calotte_,—that is, a wig with a

_coif_, as though the tonsure had been regularly performed, and that the

wig was natural hair. The officials declared he could not be introduced

unless he took off the _calotte_. He could not do this without taking off

the wig also, as he showed the sticklers of court etiquette, and stood

before them with clean-shaven head; asking, at the same time,—“Would the

Pope desire me to stand in his presence in such a plight as this?” The

Pontiff however did not yield the point readily. Perhaps his Holiness,

had he received the ambassador under bare poll, would have graciously

served him as one of his predecessors had served the Irish saint,

Malachi,—put his pontifical tiara on the good man’s head, to prevent his

catching cold!

But of all the tilters against wigs, none was so serious and chivalresque

as “Jean Batiste Thiers, Docteur en Théologie et Curé de Champrond.”

Dr. Thiers, in the year 1690, wrote a book of some six hundred pages

against the wearing of wigs by ecclesiastics. He published the same at

his own expense; and high authority pronounced it conformable in every

respect to the “Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church.” Dr. Thiers wrote

a brief preface to his work, in which he invokes an abundant visitation

of divine peace and grace on those who read his volume with tranquillity

of mind, and who preferred truth to fashion. The invocation, I fear, is

made in vain; for the tediousness of the author slays all tranquillity of

spirit on the part of the reader, who cannot however refrain from smiling

at seeing the very existence of Christianity made to depend upon the

question of perukes. The book is a dull book: but the prevailing idea

in it,—that it is all over with religion if perukes be not abolished,—is

one that might compel a cynic to inextinguishable laughter. Yes, says

the Doctor, the origin of the tonsure is to be found in the cutting of

Peter’s hair by the Gentiles, to make him look ridiculous; _therefore_,

he who hides the tonsure beneath a peruke insults the Prince of the

Apostles! A species of reasoning, anything comparable with which is not

to be found in that book which Rome has honoured by condemning—Whately’s

‘Logic.’

The volume however affords evidence of the intense excitement raised in

France by the discussion of the bearing of wigs on Christianity. For

a season, the question in some degree resembled, in its treatment at

least, that of baptismal regeneration, as now treated among ourselves. No

primitively-minded prelate would license a curé who professed neutrality

on the matter of wigs. The wearers of these were often turned out of

their benefices; but then they were welcomed in other dioceses, by

bishops who were heterodoxly given to the mundane comfort of wiggery.

Terrible scenes took place in vestries between wigged priests ready

to repair to the altar, and their brethren or superiors who sought to

prevent them. Chapters suspended such priests from place and profit;

Parliaments broke the decree of suspension, and Chapters renewed the

interdict. Decree was abolished by counter-decree, and the whole Church

was rent in twain by the contending parties.

Louis XIV. took the conservative side of the question, so far as it

regarded ecclesiastics; and the Archbishop of Rheims fondly thought he

had clearly settled the dispute by decreeing, that wigs might or might

not be worn, according to circumstances. They were allowed to infirm

and aged priests, but never at the altar. One consequence was that many

priests used first to approach near to the altar, and there taking off

their wigs, deposit the same, under protest, in the hands of attending

notaries. Such a talk about heads had not kept a whole city in confusion

since the days wherein St. Fructuarius, Bishop of Braga, decreed the

penalty of entirely-shaven crowns against all the monks of that city

caught in the fact of kissing any of its maidens. Three-fourths of the

grave gentlemen thus came under the razor! Such would not have been the

case, good reader, with you and me. Certainly not! We would not have

been found out, and we know better than to “kiss and tell, as they do at

Brentford.”

Thiers could not see in the wig the uses discerned by Cumberland, who

says, in his ‘Choleric Man,’—“Believe me, there is much good sense in

old distinctions. When the law lays down its full-bottomed periwig, you

will find less wisdom in bald pates than you are aware of.” The Curé of

Champrond says that the French priests, who yearly spent their thirty

or forty pistoles in wigs, were so irreligious that they kept their

best wigs for the world, and their oldest for God!—wearing the first

in drawing-rooms, and the latter in church. This was certainly less

ingenious than in the case of the man celebrated in the ‘Connoisseur,’

who, having but one peruke, made it pass for two:—“It was naturally a

kind of flowing bob; but by the occasional addition of two tails, it

sometimes passed as a major.”

In France wigs ended by assuming the appearance of nature. In the Reign

of Terror, the modish blonde perukes worn by females were made of hair

purchased from the executioner, of whom old ladies bought the curls which

had clustered about the young necks that had been severed by the knife of

Samson. But after this the fashion ceased among women, as it had already

done among men, beginning to do so with the latter when Franklin appeared

in his own hair, unpowdered, at the Court of Louis XVI.; and from that

period wigs have belonged only to history.

If you please, gentle reader, we will now descend from the wig to the

beard.

BEARDS AND THEIR BEARERS.

“Now of beards there be

Such a company,

Of fashions such a throng,

That it is very hard

To treat of the beard,

Though it be ne’er so long.”

_Ballad_

in LE PRINCE D’AMOUR. (1650.)

Whoever invented wigs, proud as he may be of the achievement, cannot

boast of the same antiquity for his fashion as that which attaches to the

beard. The beard, like sewing, came in with or was a consequence of sin.

With respect to sewing and sin, I have before spoken; and I will only add

here, that in the most prosperous times of Puritanism, it was the fashion

for Puritan ladies to wear aprons only of a green colour, that being

presumedly the colour of the apron worn by Eve, whose daughters they

were, and the remembrance of whose sin and the acknowledgment of their

own, they perpetuated in the adopted fashion of their day.

It is confidently asserted by Dutch philosophers,—_so_ confidently that

to suppose they have not good authority for what they assert, would be

very ungenerous on my part,—it is asserted then by these Hollanders that

Adam was created without a beard, and that the latter appendage was

suddenly conferred on his chin on the very evening of the day that he had

been such a “beast” as to allow himself to be beguiled into rebellion

by his wife. He was consequently so far changed into the similitude of

a beast, being rendered most like the goat, who is an impostor in his

way, wearing as he does the grave airs of a judge, and yet being given

to very frolicsome indulgences, in which judges should not, though they

often do, indulge.

If this be fact, one may wonder why Eve and her daughters generally

escaped this badge of opprobrium. It was perhaps on the principle

according to which we punish the receiver more than the thief. If there

were no receivers there would be less pilferers; and though Eve offered

the temptation, if Adam had only resisted it, the consequences would

have been confined within their original narrow limits, and Mr. Mechi’s

razor-strops would have been without a market.

Van Helmont, in support of this theory, asks us if we ever saw a good

angel with a beard;—one of those questions which are supposed by those

who put them to determine a dispute at once. He falls to another

conclusion thereupon; and maintains that if good angels do not wear

beards, the men who _do_ are guilty of profanity, and love goats rather

than godliness. Van Helmont himself was extremely perplexed by the Jesuit

casuists, who wrote on the lawfulness of beards, and who most lucidly

proved, under three heads,—1st, That we are bound to shave the beard;

2nd, That we are bound to let it grow; and 3rd, That we may do either the

one or the other.

St. François de Sales, the gentleman saint, was less perplexing when,

on being asked by a lady whether she might not _rouge_, smiled, and

answered, certainly, if she only painted one cheek.

Van Helmont hit the happy medium left by the Jesuitical argument, and,

shaving his beard, only cultivated his mustachios.

Southey is rather inclined to accept the Dutch account of the derivation

of beards, based as it is on the certainty that no man ever saw a good

angel wearing one; “for,” says he, “take the most beautiful angel that

ever painter designed or engraver copied, put him on a beard, and the

celestial character will be so entirely destroyed, that the simple

appendage of a tail will cacodæmonize the Eudæmon.” So it may be said,

that a monk with a fine polished bald head is hedged with a sort of

divinity, and looks altogether reverend; but only sprinkle powder from

a dredging-box upon the baldness, and you make him, if not ridiculous,

certainly mundane.

The English clergy do not appear to have estimated beards by Van

Helmont’s scale. One of the body, in the reign of Elizabeth, cherished

his beard as an incentive to righteousness. “He wore it,” he said,

“to remind him that no act of his life should be unworthy of the

gravity of his appearance.” This good gentleman’s beard assuredly did

not deserve what Shakspeare affirms some men’s _do_, namely, “not so

honourable a grave as to stuff a botcher’s cushion, or to be entombed

in an ass’s pack-saddle.” Henry VIII. on the other hand, would not

tolerate monitorism even from his own beard, and he accordingly and

characteristically cut it short. Perhaps this monarch wished also to have

it out of the way of petitioners; for stroking the beard, in sign of

supplication for mercy, was for thousands of years a recognized fashion,

as may be seen in the Classics, and in Shakspeare, _passim_. It will be

remembered that Hudibras stroked his own beard before he proceeded to

“honour the shadow” of the lady’s shoe-tie. This act has been editorially

declared to have been done as in sign of asking for her favour; from the

recollection, I suppose, of Thetis “palming” the chin of Jupiter; but I

think it was merely a piece of gallantry, “dressing” as it were, for the

occasion, as in Congreve’s ‘Way of the World,’ wherein it is said, “The

gentlemen wait but to comb, Madam, and will wait on you.” Formerly, no

gallant ascended to a lady’s boudoir without first combing his peruke at

the foot of the stairs, and assuring himself, by a glance at his pocket

mirror, that he was as well-looking a fop as ever wasted morning in

talking nonsense to a speaking and painted doll.

To pull another person’s beard, was to inflict on the wearer the most

degrading insult that could be thought of. When the Jew, who hated and

feared the living Cid Rui Dios, heard that the great Spaniard was dead,

he contrived to get into the room where the body lay, and he indulged

his revengeful spirit by contemptuously plucking at the beard. But the

“son of somebody” (the _hidalgo_) was plucked temporarily into life and

indignation by the outrage; and starting half up, endeavoured to get at

his sword,—an attempt which killed the Jew by the mere fright which it

caused.

To shave a Moslem’s beard was once a penalty as terrible as to a Chinese

the cutting off of his extended tail; and Christian princes have so

esteemed the appendage, that they have pawned the beard, or a portion

of it, for money lent, and redeemed the sacred pledge punctually at the

promised hour. They would have forfeited all claim to be honoured of men,

or rewarded of God, had they failed in their contract. In modern times

they pledge only their words; and as words are of less value than beards,

they are not so careful about the redemption thereof. That terribly

mendacious personage, the Czar Nicholas, has, at all events, made his

“parole de _gentleman_” to be synonymous with deliberate falsehood.

The beard however was long a cherished ornament of Russian chins, and

the Czar Peter was accused of profanity against that orthodoxy which so

distinguishes his successors by abolishing them. He certainly abolished

the huge and spreading honours of the Muscovite jaws by a rough process.

Taxes were laid upon them, which had their weight upon every hair;

and when the recalcitrant were encountered in the street, they were

seized, and their beards either torn from them, or shaved off with an

oyster-knife, whereby half the chin went with the entire beard. The

loyal nobility compromised the matter by preserving their beards in their

cabinets, to be buried with them. They conjectured that the angels would

neither know nor welcome them if they presented themselves at Heaven’s

gate with clean chins: they thought more of these than of clean souls.

Taylor, the water poet, catalogues in rough rhymes the various fashions

after which beards were worn. They are too tedious to enumerate, and yet

do not enumerate every fashion; for omission is made of the fact that

it was once the very “sweetest” mode to wear strings to the beard, as

Jack the highwayman did to the knees of his breeches, and the Kings of

Persia, who interwove their beards with gold thread. The “cane-coloured”

beard was always held as detestable, that hue having been, according

to tradition, that of the beard of the traitor Judas. The famous Count

Brühl, who lost Saxony but preserved a collection of wigs, was more

practical than the Water Poet. His wig museum not only contained every

variety, but they were chronologically arranged, from the days of Aaron

to those of the Count’s own time. I may add, that I have never heard of

the beard being held in dishonour except among the Chaymas, in South

America, who have a great antipathy against it.

Apollo and Mercury are the only deities of olden times who are

represented beardless. When professional barbers first arose it would be

difficult to say; Rome got hers from where she procured her cooks—Sicily;

but the Eternal City was four centuries and a half old before the chins

of her sons were submitted to the handling of mercenaries. Scipio

Africanus, despite the turmoil of battles, found time to shave every

day; and he was the first Roman who did so. Had the Senate followed the

same fashion, the invading Gaul would not have found a beard to pluck,

and perhaps the city might have been saved. The old Persians were very

obstinate in this respect; and they and the Tartars waged bloody wars,

and spilled oceans of blood in no better quarrel than the fashion of the

beard. These heathens were almost as wicked as the Christian inhabitants

of the adjacent towns of Bouvignes and Dinant, in Flanders. The people of

both localities manufactured copper kettles, and each declared that the

other’s ware was made after a sorry fashion. The animosity thus created

led to bloody and long-continued feuds; but peace was happily restored by

the time that other towns had applied themselves to the manufacture, and

this gave the old antagonists the more leisure to ruminate upon their own

folly.

When Alexander ordered the Macedonian soldiers to shave, lest their

beards should be handles whereby their enemies might capture them,

smooth chins become a universal Greek fashion. It so continued to the

reign of Justinian, but when the Turks took Byzantium, they would allow

of beards only on the chins of the conquerors; and the Normans treated

the Anglo-Saxons according to the same rule. Subsequently, in the year

1200, the Council of Lateran swept off the beards of the monks, “lest

in the ceremony of receiving the sacrament, the beard might touch the

bread and wine, or crumbs and drops fall and stick upon it.” The monks

then were, like the Emperors, _utraquists_. Of course dispensation was to

be obtained by paying for it, and it was probably _therefore_ that the

decree was issued; but some wore their beards, in despite of the Church

and her chancery, for the same reason that Fitzherbert Longbeard did in

the Norman times, to show his independence of all superiors and their

orders.

If there has really been wisdom in the wig, there has been wit in the

beard, or its owner. More, on the scaffold, put it out of reach of the

axe, because, as he said, it had committed no treason. Raleigh, when

visited by the barber of the Tower, declined to have his beard trimmed,

on the ground that there was a lawsuit pending about it, between him and

the King, and he would not lay out any capital on it till the cause had

been decided.

Raleigh’s wit reminds me of something still more witty, and quite as

germane to the subject.

A few years prior to the Revolution, the witty but rather too fiery

Linguet was committed to the Bastille. It is seldom that confinement

calms the bile of the confined; and accordingly Linguet, the next

morning, was engaged in writing _ab irato_ an article against his

incarcerators; when he was interrupted by the entrance into his room of

a tall, thin, pale, personage, whose appearance very much displeased the

celebrated advocate.

“What is your business?” said the latter, in a marked tone of ill-humour.

“Sir,” answered the other, “I come—”

“I see you are come!” interrupted the impatient lawyer, “but you are not

wel-come.”

“Possibly, Sir; but I am the Bastille barber, and I have come—”

Here the Figaro of state-prisoners burst into a laugh, and rubbing his

chin significantly with his hand, exclaimed, “Ho! ho! my good Sir, that

is a different matter; _puisque vous êtes le barbier de la Bastille,

rasez-la_;” and after so capital a pun, he addressed himself in better

humour to the cutting up of his adversaries.

The last barber who held something more than barber’s office under a

Christian king was Olivier le Dain, the _familiar_ of Louis XI. In

Persia, it has been common for the monarch’s barber to be a prince over

the people. The Khasterash, or “personal shaver,” is reverenced by all

inferior citizens; and they see nothing incongruous in the fact that

a palace and slaves are part of the rewards of a man who makes of the

beard of the Shah an eighth wonder of the world. The beard, in fact, has

ever been held in reverential regard by all Moslems, for the reason that

their prophet never allowed instrument to diminish his own. An Arab

would be as much horror-stricken now as ever Lacedemonian fugitive was of

old, if in punishment for offence he were condemned to lose, by shaving,

the half of his beard. He would infinitely prefer to lose half his family.

The wit of Linguet, mentioned above, recalls to my memory a _trait_ of

a Duc de Brissac. This nobleman was frequently heard saying, as he was

at his matutinal toilet, and was about to raise his razor to the surface

of his ducal chin:—“Now then, Timoléon de Cossé, God hath made thee a

gentleman, and the King hath made thee a duke; nevertheless, it is right

and proper that thou shouldst have something to do—therefore thou shalt

shave thyself.” I may add that it was the fashion of the De Cossés to

have one general Christian name; and I think it is Bungener who remarks,

in his ‘Julian,’ that on a gentleman of this house being brought before

the revolutionary tribunal, and asked what his baptismal name was, he

answered indignantly, “Am I not a De Cossé? and what should my Christian

name be but Timoléon?”—and he added an exclamatory “de par Dieu!” to show

that though he was in danger of death, he could swear as recklessly as

though he had still been in the galleries of Versailles.

I have said that philosophers have not disdained to write upon the beard,

and I may be honestly proud of an opportunity to follow in the wake of

the philosophers. Chrysippus has chronologized its history, and it is

from him we know that it was not before the reign of Alexander that

shaving became a fashion in the East. Timotheus, that renowned musician,

long stuck to the olden mode, and played the flute in a beard as long as

his instrument, πώγωνα μέγαν ἔχων ηὔλει: and how sweetly does that last

word interpret the flute’s sweet sound—ηὔλει! it dies away like a cadence

beneath the lips of as great a flutist as Timotheus, our own modest and

able Richardson.

The first man who shaved himself at Athens acquired a name by the act. He

was called _Korses_, the shaven, or clipped. Diogenes despised fashion,

and therefore kept his beard. Not only that; he abused all who dispensed

with it. “Ah!” he exclaimed with that mouth which lay behind a portion of

his own hirsute dirtiness,—for Diogenes had a contempt for soap;—“Ah!”

cried he, on encountering a friend newly mown, “art thou inclined then to

reproach Nature? Wouldst thou insinuate that she had done better to have

made thee a woman rather than a man?”

At Rhodes all shaving was forbidden; but the Rhodians loved to display

their independence of the law, and every man did what seemed best to his

own chin. The same unruly sort of liberty was taken by the Byzantine

barbers. The law expressly denounced razors, but scissors were tolerated.

Clipping was permitted, but shaving was pronounced irreligious. Some

priests shaved in spite of the decree. It was made a diocesan-court

matter of; and the chief pontiff, a sort of bishop in his way, rendered

an admirable judgement on the occasion. He regretted his limited powers,

but he said his course was clear. Scissors were lawful, razors illegal;

but the priests had first used the former, and the law did not say

that razors should _not_ be used after the scissors had been applied.

For his own part, he did not well know which to adopt; but he thought

his reverend gentlemen would be justified in keeping razors, but not

in using them—themselves. They might shave each other! One poor priest

inquired what _he_ was required to do, seeing that he had no beard. “Oh,”

said Λονδονικός, “in this case I have no doubt. The use of scissors is

imperative; and if you do not obey the law, I will clap you into the

Ecclesiastical Court.”

The Mahometans are very superstitious touching the beard. They bury

the hairs which come off in combing it, and break them first, because

they believe that angels have charge of every hair, and that they gain

them their dismissal by breaking it. Selim I. was the first Sultan who

shaved his beard, contrary to the law of the Koran. “I do it,” said

he apologetically to the scandalized and orthodox mufti, “to prevent

my vizier leading me by it.” He cared less for it than some of our

ancestors, two centuries ago, did for their own. They used to wear

pasteboard covers over them in the night, lest they should turn upon them

and rumple them in their sleep!

The famous Raskolniki schismatics had a similar superstition to the

Mahometan one mentioned above. They considered the divine image in man to

reside in the beard.

Not only have the shavers of barbaric kings been accounted superior

to the Prime Minister, as in our own country French _coiffeurs_ are

infinitely better paid than English curates; so to be shaved by a Prince

is to be exalted to ecstatic honours. Hoskins, the traveller, was so

operated on by the heir apparent of the Shaghes. His royal highness used

a threepenny razor, and at every stroke carried away as much chin as

beard; the honour was too much for the traveller, especially when it was

cut out with a blunt razor.

Rogers is said to have once asked Talleyrand if Napoleon shaved himself.

“Yes,” said the latter; “one who is born to be a king has some one to

shave him, but they who acquire kingdoms shave themselves.” He might have

added, “And the people too, pretty closely!”

But I am pulling the beard to a greater extent than my readers’ patience

will be inclined to bear with it. I have only to add, that the beard was

a symbol of bravery as well as of wisdom; and he who had a good one on

his chin was usually able to grasp a sword to some purpose in his hand.

Let us therefore draw the sword too, and see what can be made of it.

SWORDS.

“I love an enemy, I was born a soldier;

And he that at the head of his troop defies me,

Binding my manly body with his sword

I make my mistress.”—BONDUCA.

In the first book of the Peloponnesian War, it is stated by Thucydides

that “the people of the Continent exercised robberies upon one another;

and to this very day,” he adds, “the people of Greece are supported by

the same practices.” The great historian especially names the Ozolian

Locrians, Ætolians, and Acarnanians, and their neighbours on the

continent; among whom, as he informs his readers, the custom of wearing

their swords, or other weapons required by their old life of rapine, was

still retained. “This custom,” continues the writer, “of wearing weapons,

once prevailed throughout Greece, as the houses had no manner of defence,

as travelling was full of hazard, and the whole lives of the people were

passed in armour, like barbarians. A proof of this,” says the civilized

Thucydides, “is the continuance still in some parts of Greece of these

manners, which were once with uniformity general to all. The Athenians

were the first who discontinued the custom of wearing their swords, and

who passed from the dissolute life into more polite and elegant manners.”

What the Athenians did so long ago was not accomplished in our own

metropolis until the end of the first quarter, or rather the beginning of

the second half, of the last century. The example, slowly set by London,

was soon enforced at Bath. I say “enforced,” because there was a pleasant

despot there, who ruled so supreme that the very “Baths of Bath” seemed

only to flow at his permission.

It was in presence of “Beau Nash” that fell the swords and top-boots of

the squires and the aprons of the ladies. The results thereof, at least

of the putting aside the sword, at Bath and in London, and throughout the

country generally, where gallant submitted to be disarmed in obedience

to law or to custom, may be described in the language of Thucydides,

as applied to the Athenians when they abandoned ruffianism and adopted

refinement:—“Men passed from the dissolute life into more polite and

elegant manners.”

In the simple old Saxon days the sword played a considerable part in

the making of a knight. The candidate for chivalry was required, the

day before his consecration, to confess; and then pass the night in the

church, in prayer and fasting. On the following day he was to hear mass,

and during the service he placed his sword upon the altar; the priest,

after the Gospel, took the weapon, blessed it, and then, with benison on

the warrior, laid the blade on the neck of the knight, who however was

not a knight complete until he had received the Sacrament as a complement

of the blessing.

Thus the Church made her own cavaliers: but the Normans, who came among

us under a banner blessed by the Pope, held his method of consecration

in scorn and abomination. The knights so made they accounted of as no

knights at all, but as mere “tardy troopers and degenerate plebeians.”

So, in modern times, a militia ensign with a Norman name affects to look

with contempt on a “captain” who may have fought his way to his title

in Spain or South America; and the young noble who at Oxford has taken

a degree, not conferred by right of knowledge, but seized by right of

nobility, pretends to look down upon men who, at Bonn, at Marburg, or at

Göttingen, have penned their Latin thesis, and maintained its statements

against all adversaries, and who have won their honours,—in short, by

earning and deserving them.

They were godless fellows, those Normans, though they did come with a

papal benediction. Previous to their appearance no deed was legal that

was not marked by golden crosses and other sacred signs. The Northmen

_changèrent tout cela_: they transferred estates simply by word of mouth,

without writing or charter, and only with the sword, helmet, horn, or

cup of the owner. Tenements, we are told, were conveyed with a spur, a

bow, an arrow, or even a “body-scraper.” But this was soon found to be

inconvenient; and then the conquerors introduced the custom of confirming

deeds by wax impressions, made by the especial seal of each person, with

the subscription thereto of three or four witnesses present. Now many a

Norman had no other seal than the end of the pommel of his sword, and by

such an instrument many a Saxon was pommelled out of his estate.

And what were these Normans, from whom so many amongst us are proud

to trace their descent? They were—at least good numbers of them

were—unbaptized thieves. Such certainly were the Mandevilles and

Dandevilles, the Mohuns and Bohuns, the Bissets and Bassets. These were

fellows who had converted themselves to Christianity fifty times in

the course of the year, for the sake of the garment given each time to

every convert. Those renowned swordsmen, the Dagotes, Bastards, Talbots,

Laceys, Percys,—what were they but so many robbers who came hither

penniless, and were very much astonished at the superabundance of their

own good fortune?

Still lower in the scale must have been those Norman swordsmen whose

names translated signify Bull-head, Ox-eye, Dirty-villain, Breechless,

and the like. Nay, Wim (the) Carter, Hugh (the) Tailor, and Wim (the)

Drummer stand recorded in the _Monast. Anglic._ as having been made

Norman knights and noble by right of conquest. The ancestor of one of

our proudest dukes was a plundering scoundrel, who, having no name at

all, was known by that of the town in which he had been recruited,—St.

Maur; and the ladies of the Somerset family do not appear ashamed of the

descent, since they, not long ago, adopted the old name in preference to

that of Seymour, which some of the branches of the family still retain.

Our Chaloners, Rochfords, and Chaworths can boast of no more honourable

ancestry: they all spring from the sword-begirt loins of vagabonds, born

or recruited in Châlons, Rochefort, and Cahors; and the honourable house

of Sacheverele has no more glorious founder than a limping brigand, known

by the name of “Saute Chevreau,” or “Saut de Chevreau,” because he hopped

like a goat. Why, if antiquity of name be a thing to boast of, that of

John Adams should be most admired among men; and Winnifred Jenkins is, in

such case, more truly noble than the proudest Norman of them all.

I have noticed how possession was sometimes given with the sword. It was

perhaps in allusion to that old custom that Jack Cade touched with his

weapon that ancient piece of mystery, “London Stone.” He felt that his

title was not good until that ceremony was performed; and, that done,

“Now!” exclaimed that popular hater of national schools, “now is Mortimer

Lord of London city!” His worship the Mayor carries, by his deputy, a

similar weapon, as emblem of his sovereignty. The sword in the City

shield has another signification. Some have supposed it was placed there

in memory of the gallant chief magistrate who so summarily despatched

Wat Tyler; but the sword was in the City shield long before that period.

It was called the Sword of St. Paul; and the _Domine dirige nos_ is an

invocation that the magistracy may be taught to bear such sword like

gentlemen and Christians. Is it because the prayer has been ineffectual

that a new legend was constructed to account for the emblazoned weapon?

In the reign of Elizabeth there were two adjuncts which especially went

to the making of a gallant—the ruff and the rapier. He whose ruff was the

deepest and rapier the longest was the most unquestionable gallant; the

consequence was, that apprentices robbed their masters in order to look

like gallants. The vigorous Queen looked to it, however; and she placed

grave citizens at the gates, with orders to cut off all ruffs of above a

nail in depth, and break the points of all rapiers that were above a yard

long. The scenes at the City gates must have been turbulent enough at

those times, for it is not to be supposed that a “ruffian” would submit

quietly to the cutting of his collar or the clipping of his sword.

In earlier times, in England, the sword and poniard too had something of

sacredness attached to them: thus, when Athelstan was marching against

the Danes and Scots, he paid a visit by the way to the shrine of St. John

of Beverley. Upon the altar of the church there he deposited his poniard,

vowing that if Heaven and the Saint would help him to a victory, he would

redeem the arm at a suitable price. He gained the victory, and observed

his vow; and for years the monks there blessed the good Athelstan for

not only putting them above the law, but making them as rich as Crœsus.

If he had not, they were men who would have taken their revenge; and

they would not have scrupled, as the member of the Peace Society says in

one of the comedies of Aristophanes, “to take his measure for a suit of

Sardian scarlet,” or to have served his body as the heralds have the arms

of the Duke of Buccleuch, which, as we all know, are “bruised by a baton

sinister.”

The readers of Sterne will not need to be reminded that in ancient days

in Brittany a nobleman, too poor to support his dignity, was allowed to

make temporary sacrifice of the same by turning to commercial pursuits,

after first surrendering his sword to the keeping of the magistracy.

When fortune was achieved by honest industry, the old sword was once

more hung upon the thigh. It was a wise custom, superior to that I have

heard of in another country, where pauper aristocrats condescend to get

rich by marrying merchants’ daughters, whose dowries they as profligately

squander as though they had inherited them from their own fathers.

I have, in my ‘TABLE TRAITS,’ alluded to the use and abuse of the sword,

and therefore will not repeat here incidents already related therein; I

will merely remark that the best exemplification of the career of a mere

swordsman is to be found in the history of fighting Fulwood, the lawyer.

This hero, ever ready to draw his blade with or without reason, while

_standing_ (one night in the year of 1720), as was the custom of the pit,

to see Mrs. Oldfield in ‘The Scornful Lady,’ remonstrated roughly with

Beau Fielding for pushing against him. “Orlando the Fair” straightway

clapped his hand to his sword; and the pugnacious lawyer, determined not

to be behindhand, drew his blade, and passed it into the body of the

Beau. While the latter, who was a mature gentleman of some half-century

old, was exhibiting his wound, in order to excite the sympathy which

he could _not_ arouse in the breasts of the laughing ladies, Fulwood,

flushed by victory, hastened to the playhouse in Lincoln’s Inn Fields,

where he picked a quarrel with Captain Cusack, who was a better swordsman

than Orlando and who stopped the lawyer’s triumphs by straightway slaying

him.

The sword-clubs were suppressed by royal proclamation in 1724. They

had been denounced as unlawful three years previously. The object

of the proclamation was to banish from civilized society the sword

itself, in order thereby to check the practice of duelling, which was,

at that period, exercised exclusively by means of the sword. The law

became stringent, and judges merciless upon this point. This was made

sufficiently clear in 1726, when Major Oneby killed Mr. Gower in a

duel with swords, fought in a tavern, after a dispute over a game at

hazard. The adversaries had fought without witnesses, in a room the door

of which was closed. The Major, who had been both the aggressor and

the challenger, mortally wounded Mr. Gower, who however declared that

he had fallen in fair combat. A jury, nevertheless, found Oneby guilty

of murder; the judges acquiesced in the verdict, but the Major escaped

public execution by committing suicide.

The law had not long to wait before other offenders were summoned for too

freely using the sword. On a night in November, 1727, Savage the poet,

with two companions, named Gregory and Merchant, entered a coffee-house

near Charing-cross. Merchant insulted the company, a quarrel ensued,

swords were drawn, and a Mr. Sinclair was slain by a thrust,—it is said,

but not proved, from the sword of Savage. The result of the trial that

followed is well known. The verdict of _guilty of murder_ against Savage

and Gregory, and of _manslaughter_ against Merchant (who was the most

culpable of the three), was exacted by a villanously partial judge,

evidently under pressure of the proclamation against swords.

Merchant was at once burned in the hand in open court; he was also fined,

compelled to give security for future good behaviour, and discharged.

His associates had a narrow escape of an ignominious death, for which

they were assiduously prepared by that Dr. Edward Young, who had not then

achieved a reputation for ‘Night Thoughts,’ but who was establishing a

reputation by the publication of those ‘Satires’ which so faithfully

portray the social crimes and errors of the day.

Johnson’s Life of Savage does not notice Merchant’s sentence, nor does

it state upon what terms Savage and Gregory obtained their liberty. They

were liberated upon condition of their withdrawing to the Colonies for

the space of three years, and giving security to keep the peace. The

conditions appear to have been evaded. Gregory indeed did proceed to

Antigua, where he obtained an appointment in the customs; but the wayward

Savage sat down as a pensioner at the hearth of Lord Tyrconnell, whose

benevolence, it is hardly necessary to add, he most shamefully abused.

I think that the last duel, certainly the last _fatal_ duel, fought

with swords, was between Lord Byron and Mr. Chaworth, in January, 1762.

They had quarrelled at the Star and Garter, Pall Mall, upon a question

touching manors and game-preserves; they fought in a closed room of the

tavern, and Mr. Chaworth was slain. The circumstances of the killing

looked much more like murder than in the case of Major Oneby and Mr.

Gower. The Peers, however, acquitted Lord Byron of the capital crime, but

they found him guilty of manslaughter. His lordship claimed the benefit

of the statute of Edward VI., and he was discharged on paying his fees. A

bitter mockery of justice!

The sword appears to have been drawn in as hot wrath at the playhouse

as in the park; and sometimes to have figured by way of ridicule. I may

cite, as an example of the latter, an incident of the time of Charles II.

The court was at Dover, whither the King had gone to receive his sister,

and the mistress which that sister brought in her hand as a bribe whereby

to make of Charles the enemy of his people! At this time, the French

courtiers wore laced coats, of various colours, but all ridiculously

short. The shortness of the front part was made up for by the breadth

of the waistbelt. Nokes, the Keeley of his day, was dressed to play

Sir Arthur Addle, in ‘Sir Solomon;’ and his costume, a caricature on

the already sufficiently absurd dress of the French, so delighted the

celebrated Duke of Monmouth, that the latter took his own sword and belt

from his side, and buckled it with his own semi-royal hands about the

person of the player. We should be somewhat startled in these days if

we were to hear of Lord Augustus Fitzclarence fastening a cutlass upon

the thigh of Mr. Keeley, when acting in the ‘Thirst for Gold:’ but in

Charles’s days such freaks were very mildly construed of. The appearance

of Nokes, in his short coat and long sword, elicited a roar from King

and court, all the louder that the French originals were present. The

latter must have taken our most religious and gracious King for a sorry

barbarian; and, as chivalrous ideas went, it was very well that they

did not surround Nokes as he was going home, and “pink” him into an

everlasting incapability of ever caricaturing them again.

James II. was unquestionably more of a true gentleman in outward bearing

than his brother Charles. I have an instance of this appropriate to this

very subject of swords and actors. In the reign of James, an actor of

unimpeachable character and of very refined manners, named Smith, had

a discussion behind the scenes with a young nobleman, who, losing his

temper with getting the worst of the argument, drew his sword and struck

Smith,—for want of logic to confute him. The King forbade the courtier

to appear in his presence; and by this means proclaimed his opinion

that the nobleman was less of a gentleman than the player. But such a

manifestation of opinion roused all the so-called _gentlemen_ against

the so-called vagabond players; and the next time Smith played they

resorted to the theatre, sword in hand and catcall between their lips,

and so plied both, that, despite the royal protection, he was driven

from the stage for ever. Luckily for him, the “vagabond” was better

off, on two points, than the “noble gentlemen,” his antagonists: he had

a considerable fortune, and he was in debt to no man, not even to his

tailor.

Smith’s story of the swords drawn against him, reminds me of Mrs.

Verbruggen’s, with the sword always ready to leap from the scabbard to

defend her. Mrs. Verbruggen was the Mrs. Sterling of her period,—that

is, the cleverest of artificial actresses. It would be pertinent to

my subject of ‘Habits’ to speak of her as she appeared in what is

called “breeches parts;” but I am afraid if I were to describe her,

as old Anthony Aston does, who so often saw and wondered, it would be

considered very _impertinent_ indeed. I _may_ tell however what he

says of her face. “It was of a fine smooth oval,” says Anthony, “full

of beautiful and well-disposed moles, as were her neck and breast.” He

afterwards adds:—“She was the best conversation possible,—never captious

or displeased at anything but what was gross or indecent. For she was

cautious, lest fiery Jack should so resent it as to breed a quarrel; for

he would often say, ‘Damme! though _I don’t much value my wife_, yet

nobody shall affront her;’ and his sword was drawn on the least occasion,

which was much in fashion at the latter end of King William’s reign.”

It is a funny trait of the sword-wearers, that they could extol the

virtue which they had ineffectually endeavoured to destroy. We see

this in the case of Mrs. Bracegirdle, that Diana of the stage before

whom Congreve and Lord Lovelace, at the head of a troop of bodkined

fops, worshiped in vain. The noblest of the troop,—and it reckoned the

Dukes of Devonshire and Dorset, the Earl of Halifax, and half-a-dozen

delegates from each rank of the peerage among its members,—were wont,

at the coffee-house, and over a bottle, to extol the Gibraltar-like

virtue, if I may so speak, of this incomparable woman. “Come,” said

Halifax, “you are always praising the virtue; why don’t you reward the

lady who will not sell it? I propose a subscription, and there are two

hundred guineas, _pour encourager les autres_.” Four times that amount

was raised, and with it the nobles, with their swords in their hands,

waited on Mrs. Bracegirdle, who accepted their testimonial, as it was

intended in honour of her virtue. What should we think now if⸺? but this

is a delicate matter, and I _might_ make a mistake. I will only add,

therefore, that had Mrs. Bracegirdle been rewarded for her charity, the

recompense would have been, at least, as appropriate. For it is true of

her that when the poor saw her they blessed her,—and, we may add, she

richly merited the well-earned benedictions. She was, at all events,

not quite so prudish as Mrs. Rogers, who not only objected to act any

but virtuous characters, but made a public vow of chastity,—in an

epilogue,—and broke it, out of good-nature.

It must be understood that the players wore swords in the streets, and

used them, like gentlemen, for the destruction of one another. Thus Quin

killed Will Bowen, in 1717. The former had declared that Ben Jonson acted

Jacomo, in the ‘Libertine,’ better than Bowen. The latter pursued Quin

to a tavern, shut the door of the room in which he found him, placed

his back against the door, and threatened to pin Quin to the wainscot

if he did not immediately draw. Quin remonstrated, but drew and kept on

the defensive; while the impetuous Bowen so pressed upon his adversary

that he actually fell upon that adversary’s sword and died, after

acknowledging his own rashness. Quin was tried and acquitted.

The actors however had need to wear swords to defend themselves from

their noble assailants. The latter used to crowd between the side-scenes,

and often interrupt the performance by crossing the stage and conversing

aloud with one another. On one occasion, at the house in Lincoln’s

Inn Fields, an earl, who was said to have been drunk for six years

continuously, was guilty of this rudeness; and Rich, enraged thereat,

threatened never to allow him to be admitted again, whatever he might

offer for it. The Peer replied by slapping Rich in the face; and Rich

returned the salute with all the vigour and rapidity that belonged to

him as an accomplished harlequin. The drunken lord’s drunken companions

immediately drew, and solemnly devoted Rich to death. The comrades of the

latter, headed by Ryan, the ex-tailor, whipped out their swords too (some

of them wore them with their court suits in Macbeth), charged the nobles,

and after a bloody _mêlée_ drove them into the streets. The illustrious

drunkards, brandishing their weapons, attacked the front of the house,

fought their way into the boxes, proceeded to destroy the interior

adornments, and would have set fire to the theatre but for the arrival

of the “watch,” who captured the whole of the rioters. Justice was both

lame and blind in those days, and the peers compromised the matter with

the managers; but George I. was as much disgusted with the conduct of his

“noble” subjects as a quiet scamp _could_ be at the peccadilloes of noisy

ones. The _only_ men, not nobles, who were as great nuisances with their

swords, were the Darby Captains. These were old “half-pays” or penniless

“disbanded,” who used to pitch their tent at Derby’s Coffee-house in

Covent-garden, and who were sanguinary in their cups. The “H. P.’s” who

now meet in Ryder-street have little idea of the truculency of their

predecessors, who most did congregate at the hostelrie whence they

derived their name, and some pretenders their rank.

I have alluded to the proclamation against swords in 1724. It appears to

have been made in vain, for in 1755 I find the aristocrats still ruling

the theatre by power of naked weapons and impudence. Garrick received

from them this questionable support when he brought out the ‘Chinese

Festival,’ with Noverre and other foreign dancers from the neighbourhood

of “Zurich’s fair waters.” A war with France had just broken out, and the

mob were like Foote’s patriot gingerbread-maker in the Borough, who would

not tolerate three dancers from Switzerland because he hated the French.

The ochlocracy hissed; the aristocracy drew their swords to silence the

villains; the latter welcomed the battle, and they not only damaged the

theatre and many illustrious heads, but they pretty nearly destroyed

Garrick’s own private residence. Roscius lost nearly £4000 in this

quarrel, wherein swords were drawn and blood spilt that was of no value

to the manager; and the present Mr. Noverre, of Norwich (I believe),

can hardly make even a faint guess of the dire storm which greeted his

great-grandsire when he first cut an _entrechat_ on the boards of Old

Drury.

But actors had bloody frays of their own, and that too among the gentler

part of the profession. One I may mention, as it is connected with a

matter of dress. The charming George Anne Bellamy had procured from Paris

two gorgeous dresses, wherein to enact Statira in the ‘Rival Queens.’

Roxana was played by Peg Woffington; and she was so overcome with malice,

hatred, and all uncharitableness, when she saw herself eclipsed by the

dazzling glories of the resplendent Bellamy, that Peg at length attempted

to drive her off the stage, and with upheld dagger had wellnigh stabbed

her at the side-scenes. Alexander and a posse of chiefs with hard names

were at hand, but the less brilliantly-clad Roxana rolled Statira and her

spangled sack in the dust, pommelling her the while with the handle of

her dagger, and screaming aloud—

“Nor he, nor Heaven, shall shield thee from my justice;

Die, sorceress, die! and all my wrongs die with thee!”

Poor Madge! Not many weeks afterwards she was playing Rosalind, when she

was, at the age of forty-four, struck with the fit that slowly conducted

her to the grave. Her last words were, “If I were among you, I would kiss

as many of you as had beards that pleased me.” The stroke followed, then

a scream, and she who had charmed multitudes was for ever charmless. I

will only add here that it is said of O’Brien, of whom I have spoken

elsewhere as having married an earl’s daughter, that “in the drawing

of his sword he threw all other performers at a wonderful distance by

his swiftness, grace, and superior elegance.” But O’Brien was the son

of a fencing-master, and his brother actors were as jealous of him as

Pepys of his friend Pen, as illustrated by the entry which says (May,

1662), “Walked with my wife to my brother Tom’s; our boy waiting on us

with his sword, which this day he begins to wear, _to outdo Sir W. Pen’s

boy_.” From which it would appear that gentlemen and footmen once had

fashions, if not vices, in common; and that our ancestors, with regard to

pride, were as great fools as ourselves; and _that_ is eminently, nay,

pre-eminently consoling.

The players were not scared from using swords as well as displaying

them. When Garrick played Bayes in the ‘Rehearsal,’ in 1741-2, he gave

imitations of Hall, Delaney, Ryan (the ex-tailor), Bridgewater, and of

Gifford. The first four bore the ridicule better than Roscius would have

endured the like of himself; but Gifford was so dreadfully enraged at the

liberty taken with him that he sent Davy a challenge, and the two mimes

fought until Gifford, whipping his rapier through the fleshy part of

Garrick’s arm, laid him up for a fortnight, and cured him of mere mimicry.

I have noticed above how Peg Woffington, with her pointed dagger, punched

the ribs of the exquisite Bellamy; a similar, but more disagreeable

sort of excitement, once seized on Woodward, the old pupil of Merchant

Tailors’, who had turned actor. He was playing Petruchio to Kitty Clive’s

Catherine, when, borne away by his towering rage, he not only threw the

lady down, but ran a fork into her finger; and as he had no love for

Kitty, it is said that there was more design than accident in the matter.

But this I do not believe. More credit, I fancy, is to be attached to the

story which says, that when Pasta played Otello to Sontag’s Desdemona,

the former was so excited by the superabundant applause gained by her

rival, that in the killing scene Otello twisted a strong hand into

Desdemona’s luxuriant hair, and gave it a series of such hearty tugs,

that the gentle lady, married to the Moor, screamed with all her might,

_au naturel_!

When the most pleasant and reasonable of Popes was Legate at Bologna,

a circumstance connected with swords came under his observation. Two

senators had fallen into a deadly quarrel touching the pre-eminence of

Tasso and Ariosto. A duel ensued, in which the champion of Ariosto was

mortally wounded. The future Pope visited the dying man, whose sole

observation to his visitor’s religious injunctions was—“What an ass I am,

to get run through the body in the very flower of my age, for the sake

of Ariosto, of whom I have never read a line.” “But—” interrupted the

priest. “And if,” exclaimed the dying man, not heeding the interruption,

“if I _had_ read him, I should not have understood him; for I am but a

fool at the best of times.” Benedict himself had a respect for swordsmen;

and it was said of him and that other pleasant fellow, his contemporary,

the Sultan Mahmoud, that if they were made to change places, the Holy

Father becoming Grand Seigneur, and the Sultan becoming Pope, nobody

would be sensible of any consequent difference; except, perhaps, the most

intimate portion of the Sultan’s household. Benedict was, at all events,

wiser than that celebrated Capuchin, who, preaching repentance to a party

about to resort to the arbitration of the sword, exclaimed, “Brethren,

admire and bless Divine Providence, who has placed death at the close of

life, in order that we might have the more time to be prepared for it.”

This confusion of ideas reminds me of that which existed in the mind of

the soldier who remarked, that people nowadays did not live to such a

lengthened age as when he was young. “Not that there are not old people

now,” said he, “but then _they_ were born a very long time ago!”

Finally, let me conclude the subject of swords with something better

worth remembering than mere gossip. Toledo, Damascus, and Milan have

been especially renowned for the excellence of the swords manufactured

in those respective places. The quality of the Spanish blade is said to

have been given it by the cunning of Arab workmen; but the fact is, that

Spanish blades were famous for their power of letting daylight into the

soul’s tabernacle as early as the old Roman time. When the first Cæsar

was master of the empire, Iberian tailors (and ladies) worked only with

Toledo needles; while Iberian officers and gentlemen (for the characters

were distinct in those heathen times: as for the matter of that, they

sometimes are now) fought only with Toledo blades. Virgil alludes to

the excellence of the Spanish steel in his first Georgic: “At Chalybes

nudi ferrum (mittunt).” Justin says the Chalybes were Spaniards; and

the _nudi_, no doubt, refers to the fashion in which they worked at the

forge. Dryden translates the line—“And naked Spaniards temper steel

for war.” Further, Diodorus Siculus states, “that the Celtiberians so

tempered their steel, that no helmet could resist the stroke of the

sword.”

The temper of the Damascus blade was of another sort. It was so fine that

the sword passed through the lightest object floating in the air. The

merits of the two methods will be found admirably illustrated in Scott’s

story of ‘The Talisman.’

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.”

The flinging down of a sandal upon a territory was a symbol of occupancy

or possession. “Upon the land of Edom do I cast my shoe” (sandal), says

the Psalmist, in the 9th Psalm. And this was a symbol of slavery to the

Edomites, for to loose the sandal was the office of a slave; and in

Egypt, especially, we find paintings of slaves who are carrying their

master’s sandals. On the sole of the latter was sometimes represented a

captive, whom the wearer had the pleasure of thus pictorially treading

underfoot. When an old shoe is thrown after a newly married couple, it

does not so much imply that they have probably been put in possession of

felicity, as that they have certainly lost their liberty.

Xenophon remarks that the Persians wore coarse clothes, fought

bareheaded, and never required pocket-handkerchiefs. He laughs at them

however for using gloves, and for effeminately covering their heads, when

the latter might best dispense with the protection. Laertes, the Greek,

wore gloves when he was gardening, in order to protect his fingers from

the thorns;—and this shows that young Greek noblemen, in remote times,

could occupy themselves usefully and innocently. _Our_ youths, with much

time, heavy purses, and a lordship of self, would find considerable

profit in “putting on the gloves” for no worse purposes.

Gloves were not common among the Romans, but they were not entirely

unknown. Varro says that to pluck olives without them was to spoil the

olive; and Athenæus tells of a glutton who used to dine out in gloves,

and so be enabled to dispose of the hot things quicker than the guests

who were less prepared for the handling them. The fashion of gloves made

its way however in Rome, in spite of the philosophers who affected to

despise comfort, and did assuredly decline cleanliness. They were worn,

for instance, by the secretary of the elder Pliny.

The mode seems to have been adopted in some excess by the monks, until

a decree of the Council of Aix ordered that they should wear none but

gloves of sheep-skin. Had they turned their cilices into gloves, and made

flesh-brushes of them, it would have been more profitable to themselves,

and to all who stood near them. In France, the use of gloves was allowed

only to bishops. They were sometimes used in great formalities of the

“Church,” and indeed of the State also; for bishops received investiture

by presentation of a glove, and kings were not half crowned who did not

receive a pair, with an episcopal blessing to enhance the gift.

Among the early English, the Anglo-Saxons, we find that ladies, before

they knew the use of the glove, or applied their knowledge to its most

convenient conclusion, had the ends of their mantles shaped into gloves,

and these were worn over the hand, under the name of mufflers. Gloves

were worn by females before the Reformation, despite what Gough says to

the contrary. A dishonoured knight was deprived not only of his spurs,

but of his gloves also. It was right that the symbol for or gage of

battle should be taken from him whose office it had been to carry arms,

but who was no longer accounted as worthy of wielding them.

In Germany, he who entered a prince’s stables, or was present at the

killing of a stag, without taking off his gloves, had to pay his

footing or fine; in the first case to the grooms, in the second to the

huntsmen,—and for this reason, because they could not mingle among grooms

and huntsmen, and yet retain their dignity (asserted by keeping on the

glove), without paying for it.

Gloves are distributed at funerals,—perhaps originally as a challenge

from the doctor, defying all who shall dare say that he had committed

murder contrary to the rules of art. But they were acceptable presents on

other occasions; and when gloves were rare, and James I. and Elizabeth

gave those rich and rare articles as gifts to various members of the

Denny family, no doubt the fingers of the latter felt the honour deeply.

When these gloves were sold, some two centuries and a half later, a

single pair fetched a price for which a man with judgment and taste

might purchase a select library. One of this family, Sir William Denny

himself, contributed a remarkable poetical work to the libraries of

1653, namely, the ‘Pelecanicidium, or the Christian Adviser against

Self-murder; together with a Guide, and a Pilgrim’s Pass to the Land of

the Living.’ In the preface he says, “Mine ears do tingle to hear so many

sad relations, as ever since March last, concerning several persons, of

divers rank and quality, inhabiting within and about so eminent a city

as late-famed London, that have made away and murdered themselves.”

In England gloves came in about the time the Heptarchy went out. The

exact period is not known; but we _do_ know that when a society of German

merchants sought protection for the trade which they carried on between

their own country and England, they propitiated King Ethelred II. by

presenting him with five pairs of gloves: their not being able to muster

the half-dozen shows the rarity of the article. In the case mentioned the

gloves were probably not so much a gift or bribe, as a portion of duty

paid in kind. Prior to this period the hands of both sexes were covered,

as I before observed, by the mantles; and some persons with rapidly

progressing ideas, had donned an imperfect structure which presented a

stall for the thumb, and a sort of stocking-foot for the rest of the

fingers. They were like the mufflers which we place on the digits of

young England; and when Mrs. Ramsbottom made the observation I quoted in

the first paragraph, of “having had much walking on her hands lately,”

she may have had these very mufflers in her eye.

Gloves soon became fashionable among the higher classes; at least,

Ordericus Vitalis tells us that when the Bishop of Durham escaped from

the Tower, during the reign of Henry I., he had to slide down a rope;

and as the bishop, in his hurry, had “forgotten his gloves,” he rubbed

the skin off his hands to the bone, in descending from the window. Duke

Charles of Guise, when he escaped in a similar manner, from the Château

at Tours, in the days of Henri III., had better fortune; he descended

more leisurely than the bishop, being lighter, and with no further

detriment than a rent in his hose.

Long before the period referred to by Ordericus, the French monks

were the authorized glove-makers. They especially loved hunting, but

respectability required that they should not love the sport merely for

the sport’s sake. Accordingly, Charlemagne granted to the monks of Sithin

especially, unlimited right of hunting, because of the skins of the deer

killed by them they made gloves and girdles, and covers for books. I have

before noticed, that by a subsequent decree of the Council of Aix, in the

time of Louis le Débonnaire, monks were forbidden to wear any gloves but

those made of sheep-skin.

Gloves were popular new-year’s gifts, or sometimes “glove-money” in

place of them; occasionally, these gloves carried gold pieces in them.

When Sir Thomas More was Chancellor, he decided a case in favour of Mrs.

Croaker against Lord Arundel; the former, on the following new-year’s

day, gratefully presented the judge with a pair of gloves with forty

angels in them. “It would be against good manners,” said the Chancellor,

“to forsake a gentlewoman’s new-year’s gift, and I accept the gloves. The

_lining_ you will elsewhere bestow.”

It will be remembered that St. Gudule had the faculty of being able, when

her candle was extinguished, to blow it in again. Many among us enjoy

the same faculty, and schoolboys often practise the miracle,—the only

one ever performed by St. Gudule. It is said however that when the saint

prayed, barefooted, in church, the attendant priest, moved by compassion,

put his gloves under her feet. They immediately rose, and hung in the air

for a whole hour;—but what that proves, I really do not know.

But we have had gloves suspended in our own churches. When Bernard Gilpin

was preaching in the North of England, he observed, on entering one of

the churches there, a glove suspended from the roof; and having learned

that it was a challenge placed there by a Borderer, in defiance of some

other Borderer, he tore it down, to the great disgust of the sexton,

who had a respect for established usages, even though the devil had

invented them. Good Bernard Gilpin gave a challenge of his own from the

pulpit: he flung down the Gospel before the rather angry people, who were

highly civilized, and therefore averse to innovation; and he told them so

defiantly of the difficulties in the way of their salvation, that they

determined to surmount them and became a Christian people; and _that_,

under correction, is a better glove, and a greater miracle, than those of

St. Gudule.

I have spoken, in another page, of our old English custom of kissing.

It is one which is not likely to decay. We still kiss persons caught

napping,—that is, if they be worth the kissing,—and exact as forfeit the

price of a new pair of gloves. In old days, he who first saw the new moon

could, by kissing a maiden, and proclaiming the fact,—that is, the lunar

fact,—claim a pair of gloves for his service. The Persian habit was to

kiss only relatives, which must have been highly proper, but uncommonly

insipid,—a perfect waste of good things, except among cousins.

Our Queen Elizabeth was a wearer of gloves that are said to have been of

a very costly description. Shakspeare was once acting in her presence

the part of a king—one of his own making; and so careful was he of the

illusion of the scene, that he forgot all other things beside. The Virgin

Queen resolved to put him to the proof; and as the mimic king passed

before her, she dropped one of her gloves. Shakspeare, faithful subject

as well as actor, immediately paused, and with the words that, “although

bent on this high embassy, yet stoop we to pick up our cousin’s glove,”

he presented it to the real queen, and then passed on. This anecdote is

often cited to prove that nothing could induce the poet-actor to depart

from the business of the stage; and it proves exactly the contrary; but

as an illustration of gloves I have found it handy to my purpose.

Elizabeth treated Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, more generously than she

did Shakspeare. The Queen gave him her glove, which, she having dropped

it, he had picked up to return to her. He immediately adorned it with

jewels, and placed it in his cap, where he displayed it at all jousts and

tournaments. Chivalrous gentlemen at Donnybrook Fair follow something of

this fashion when they draw a chalk line round their hat, and knock down

every one bold enough to declare that it is not silver lace. Elizabeth, I

may add, received as well as gave gloves. The first embroidered pair ever

worn in England were presented to her by Vere, Earl of Oxford, when he

returned from a mission abroad. The Queen had her portrait taken with the

gloves introduced.

And speaking of embassies, recalls to my memory another story connected

with gloves and legations. Ambassadors’ effects are passed without

examination,—not by law, but out of courtesy. This courtesy has made

smuggleresses of many an envoy’s wife; of none more than of a French

Ambassadress, not very many years ago, in England. She used to import

huge cases of gloves under the name of “despatches,” and these she

condescended to sell to English ladies who were mean enough to buy

them. But the custom-house officers became tired of being accomplices

in this contraband trade, and they put a stop to it by a very ingenious

contrivance. Having duly ascertained that a case directed to the Embassy

contained nothing but ladies’ gloves, they affected to treat it as a

letter which had been sent through the Customs by mistake, and which they

made over to the Post-office. The authorities of the latter delivered

the same in due course; the postage-fee of something like £250 was paid

without a remark; and the Ambassadress stopped all further correspondence

of that sort by declining to deal any longer in gloves.

But even the Customs get defeated occasionally, in spite of their

cleverness. Some years ago a celebrated exporter of contraband goods,

residing at Calais, sent on the same day, to two different parts of

England, two cases of gloves, one containing gloves only for the right,

the other case, gloves only for the left hand. The “left hands” got

safely to their destination, but the “rights” were seized. The Customs

however could find no purchaser at the usual sales for single gloves, but

they were at last bought by an individual at the rate of a penny a dozen;

this individual happened to be the possessor of the other single gloves,

and he reaped a rich profit by the trick over the fair and honest dealer.

This was a more successful trick with the gloves than that practised by

the lady who, flinging her pretty gauntlet on to the arena where some

wild beasts were struggling, bade her knight descend and bring it back to

her. The cavalier accomplished the task, but he smote the cruel damsel in

the face with the glove ere he threw it at her feet; and, turning on his

heel, he left her for ever. She of course lived on in single sullenness;

and I warrant that she never saw white gloves and a wedding without a

twinge at her heart.

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.