Chapter X: Act III (5)

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.

A gentleman once said, in defence of Shakspeare, that his vulgar characters, though low, were natural. Voltaire, to whom this was said, observed the advantage to be derived from such an assertion by one who, like himself, hated Shakspeare:—“Avec permission, mon derrière est bien dans la nature, et cependant je porte culotte.” This illustration reminds me of a stage pair of breeches, which, some eighty years ago, had wellnigh killed that fair and fairly-reputable actress, Miss Maria Macklin. She was famous for her male characters, and for her taste in dressing them; Dejazet has not a better taste in this respect. But Miss Macklin unfortunately had not only worn the male garment repeatedly, but she was in the habit of buckling the garter portion of it so tightly, that the result was a large and dangerous swelling in the knee, which, we are told by Kirkman and Cooke, “from _motives of delicacy_, she would not suffer to be examined till it had increased to an alarming size!” An operation however was successfully performed, and she bore it courageously; but she never regained her strength, and she died the victim of false delicacy and a little vanity.

But, false or not, her delicacy was very like that of Mary of Burgundy, who died in consequence of over-modesty, in concealing an injury in the thigh, caused by a fall from a horse. Mary’s husband, Maximilian, had his delicate scruples too,—that is, on one point—the point of putting on a shirt, which he would never do in the presence of a _valet_. The idea of doing what Louis XIV. so regularly did,—namely, put on a shirt, and that sometimes a rather dirty one, in presence of a roomful of people,—would have made the modest and moneyless Maximilian turn pale with disgust. Perhaps however Maximilian hated shirts, because they were not of German invention. Like the old gentleman in the ‘Wasps’ of Aristophanes, who, being desired to put on a pair of Lacedæmonian boots, excuses himself on the plea that one of his toes is πάνυ μισολάκωυ—altogether hostile to the Lacedæmonians; a bit of wit, by the way, which honest Sheridan has fitted on to the character of Acres, who hates French dancing terms for the reason that his feet don’t understand _pas_ this and _pas_ that; and that he decidedly has most “Anti-Gallican toes.” This expression is decidedly a plagiarism from the admirable low-comedy scene in the ‘Wasps,’ where good Master Bdelycleon so daintily dresses his father Philocleon, the Athenian Dicast, and gallantly compliments him at last, by comparing him to “a boil covered with garlic.”

The Aristophanic incident recalls to my memory one of a somewhat similar quality, which really occurred some years ago at Gosport. Mr. Joseph Gilbert, who had been attached to the astronomical service in Captain Cook’s expedition to observe the transit of Venus, and whose name was conferred by the great navigator on “Gilbert’s Island,” resided at Gosport; where, according to the fashion of the day, he, like the Count d’Artois, wore very tight leather breeches. He had ordered his tailor to attend on him one morning, when his granddaughter, who resided with him, had also ordered her shoemaker to wait upon her. The young lady was seated in the breakfast-room, when the maker of leather breeches was shown in; and, as she did not happen to know one handicraftsman more than the other, she at once intimated that she wished him to measure her for a pair of “leathers,” for, as she remarked, the wet weather was coming, and she felt cold in “cloth.” The modest tailor could hardly believe his ears. “Measure you, Miss?” said he with hesitation. “If you please,” said the young lady, who was remarkable for much gravity of deportment; “and I have only to beg that you will give me plenty of room, for I am a great walker, and I do not like to wear anything that constrains me.” “But, Miss,” exclaimed the poor fellow in great perplexity, “I never in my life measured a lady; I⸺” and there he paused. “Are you not a lady’s shoemaker?” was the query calmly put to him. “By no means, Miss,” said he; “I am a leather-breeches maker, and I have come to take measure not of you, but Mr. Gilbert.” The young lady became perplexed too, but she recovered her self-possession after a good common-sense laugh, and sent the maker of breeches to her grandpapa.

Rosemary-lane was not only of old, and under its name of Rag Fair, a great mart for cast-off garments, but especially, by some freak of ochlocratic fashion, for breeches. It has had the honour of being noticed by Pope as “a place near the Tower of London, where old clothes and frippery are sold;” and, says Pennant, “the articles of commerce by no means belie the name. There is no expressing the poverty of the goods, nor yet their cheapness. A distinguished merchant, engaged with a purchaser, observing me to look on him with great attention, called out to me, as his customer was going off with his bargain, to observe that man, ‘for,’ says he, ‘I have actually clothed him for fourteen pence.’” And in the ‘Public Advertiser’ for February 14, 1756, we read, as an incident of the locality “where wave the tattered ensigns of Rag Fair,” that “Thursday last one Mary Jenkins, who deals in old clothes in Rag Fair, sold a pair of breeches to an old woman for sevenpence and a pint of beer. Whilst they were drinking it in a public-house, the purchaser, in unripping the breeches, found quilted in the waistband eleven guineas in gold, Queen Anne’s coin, and a thirty-pound banknote, dated in 1729, which last she did not know the value of till after she sold it for a gallon of twopenny purl.”

To go a little further back, I may say that the Reformation had other results besides those usually recorded; thus that great event was no sooner accomplished than the brokers and sellers of old apparel took up their residence in Hounsditch, where their great enemy, the Spanish Ambassador, had previously had a residence. Their locality was then “a fair field, sometime belonging to the Priory of the Holy Trinity, at Aldgate.” “Where gott’st thou this coat, I mar’le,” says Wellbred to Brainworm, in Jonson’s ‘Every Man in his Humour.’ “Of a Houndsditch man, Sir,” answers Brainworm; “one of the devil’s near kinsmen, a broker.”

We have another portion of dress whose origin dates from a serious personage and from eventful times. I allude to that terror of gentlemen who do not possess that which frogs and properly-built men alone possess in common,—namely, calves;—I allude, I say, to “pantaloons.” This tight-fitting garment was once part of the official costume of the great standard-bearer of the Venetian Republic. He carried on his banner the Lion of St. Mark, and he was the _Piantaleone_, or Planter of the Lion, around whose glorious flag and tightly-encased legs the battle ever raged with greatest fury, and where victory was most hotly contended for. The tight parti-coloured legs of the tall Piantaleone were the rallying points of the Venetians. Where _his_ thighs were upright, the banner was sure to be floating in defiance or triumph over them; and Venice may be said to have stood upon the legs of her Pantaloons. He who once saved states was subsequently represented as the most thoroughly battered imbecile of a pantomime. But therein was a political revenge. Harlequin, Clown, and Columbine represented different states of Italy, whose delight it was to pillory Venice by beating her nightly under the guise of the old buffoon “Signor Pantaloon.” The dress has survived the memory of this fact, though the dress too is almost obsolete.

In the last paragraph there is the phrase “I say” interpolated, the use of which reminds me of a tailor-like comment made upon it. Erskine writing to Boswell, or Boswell to Erskine, I forget now which, remarks that “a sentence so clumsily worded as to require an ‘I say’ to keep it together, very much resembles, in my candid opinion, a pair of ill-mended breeches.”

The article of _braccæ_ is suggestive of _buttons_; and touching these, I may observe that there is a curious law extant with regard to them. It is, by Acts of Parliament passed in three reigns,—William III., Anne, and George I.,—perfectly illegal for tailor to make, or mortal man to wear, clothes with any other buttons appended thereto but buttons of brass. This law is in force for the benefit of the Birmingham makers; and it further enacts, not only that he who makes or sells garments with any but brass buttons thereto affixed, shall pay a penalty of forty shillings for every dozen, but that he shall not be able to recover the price he claims, if the wearer thinks proper to resist payment. Nor is the Act a dead letter. It is not many weeks since, that honest Mr. Shirley sued plain Mr. King for nine pounds sterling, due for a suit of clothes. King pleaded non-liability on the ground of an illegal transaction, the buttons on the garment supplied having been made of cloth, or bone covered with cloth, instead of gay and glittering brass, as the law directs. The judge allowed the plea; and the defendant having thus gained a double suit without cost, immediately proceeded against the defendant to recover his share of the forty shillings for every dozen buttons which the poor tailor had unwittingly supplied. A remarkable feature in the case was, that the judge who admitted the plea, the barrister who set it up, and the client who profited by it, were themselves all buttoned contrary to law!

If I were writing an Encyclopædia of Trades, I would be as elaborate as Dryasdust on the manufacture of buttons of all sorts of metal, more or less costly; of wood, bone, ivory, horn, leather, paper, glass, silk, wool, cotton, linen, thread, flock, compressed clay, etc. etc.—so that both my readers and myself have a lucky escape. As the age however is statistical in its inclinations, I will save my credit by remarking that at Birmingham, the chief seat of button-manufacture, there are not less than five thousand persons engaged in the manufacture of buttons, and that half this number consists of women, and children.

Having said this, I turn to a new chapter, wherein there will be something more of statistics, and something new about stockings.

STOCKINGS.

“Troth, Master Inkpen, thou hast put thy foot
Into a pretty subject.”—OLD PLAY.

When the old trunkhose was found to fray the sacred epidermis of Christian kings and queens, the first fruits of a remedial discovery were presented for the benefit of the illustrious sufferers. Thus we hear that when stockings were first known in Europe, a Spanish grandee manifested his loyalty and love for his Queen, by presenting a pair to the Prime Minister, with a request that that official would place them at, if not on, the feet of his sovereign lady. The Minister was shocked at the grandee’s assurance and lack of modesty. “Take back thy stockings,” said he, “and name the thing not again; for know, O foolish Sir Duke, that the Queen of Spain has no legs!”

Our Henry III., less nice with regard to his own sister the Princess Isabella, did not scruple to present her with a pair of stockings of cloth, embroidered with gold.

These cloth hose went out of fashion in the reign of Elizabeth. Her silk-woman, Montague, had presented her Majesty with a pair of black knit silk stockings; and these were so pleasant to the legs of “England,” that her Majesty discarded hot cloth for ever. She found double comfort in the first; namely, to herself, and further comfort that by adopting them she was encouraging a home-made article. The first pair of English-knit worsted stockings were worn by Elizabeth’s Peer, “proud Pembroke.” They had been imitated from an Italian knit pair by William Rider, apprentice to Thomas Burdett, at the Bridge foot, opposite St. Magnus’ Church; and their presentation to Pembroke was, doubtless, profitable to the apprentice.

Disappointed love has been the cause of various dire effects, but I do not know that it ever caused effect so singular as when it invented a stocking-frame. This too was in Elizabeth’s time. In those golden days, Will Lee, of Woodborough, in Norfolk, was a student at Cambridge; somewhat given to maidens as well as to mathematics, but not so utterly wasting his time with the former pleasant trifles but that he found both learning and leisure to achieve an M.A. degree, and obtain a Fellowship.

Master Lee was especially addicted to talk agreeable nonsense to an honest lass in the town, who gained her living, and increased the smiles on her pretty face, by knitting stockings, to her very great profit. Now this Cambridge damsel did not care the value of a dropped stitch for such love as rich Will Lee brought her at sundown every coming eve; and she told him as much. “Ay, marry!” said the vindictive lover, “then thou shalt rue thy words and thy contempt.”—“_Marry_ scenteth of Rome,” said the orthodox knitter; “and thou art as false in love as in faith.”

Master Lee however was a “fellow” who was true to his word. He was piqued at being rejected,—_he_, a gentleman, by a pert knitter of stockings; and he took but a base way of revenging his pique. He had sat knitting his brow in vain, when all at once the thought struck him that he would knit stockings too, and that by a process which should ruin the poor damsel, who, poor as she was, despised an unworthy gentleman and scholar. Thereupon he actually invented and set up the stocking-frame. He first worked at it himself, and then taught his squire-brothers, and his gentle relations; and finally he opened a manufactory at Calverton in Nottinghamshire, and made stockings for the Maiden Queen.

All the hand-knitters were in despair, and they left no means untried to bring the new invention into disrepute. Nor did they try in vain, for Will Lee was driven out of England by the force of the coalition against him. He set up his frames at Rouen, and drove a “roaring trade” there, which was however interrupted by the confusion which followed upon the assassination of Henri IV.; and the inventor of the stocking-frame ultimately died at Paris, poorer than the humble knitting-maiden whom he tried to ruin in two ways, and failed in both.

And a double moral may be drawn upon this story as neatly as two stockings upon a pair of becoming legs. Swains too lightly given of phrase in honest maidens’ ears may reflect, as they pull on their hose, that treachery, as in the case of Will Lee, brought that gentlemanly knave to want even a foot to the stockings he had made at his own frame. Maidens, on the other hand, may as profitably reflect, when similarly engaged, that they had better knit stockings than lend ear to the wicked words of a fool; and that if once a hole be made in the stocking of their reputation, the most skilful darning will hardly repair, and can never conceal, the permanent injury.

And _à propos_ of darning, though it be not at all so to the above story, Shuter was one day reproached by a brother actor that he had a hole in his stocking, and the friend advised inimitable Ned to have it darned. “I will not be such an ass,” exclaimed the original Sir Anthony Absolute; “a hole in the stocking is an accident that may happen to any gentleman, but a darn is premeditated poverty.”

King James I. was willing to do what would have shocked even Shuter,—namely, wear borrowed stockings. There is a letter extant in which that monarch asks a noble to lend him the “scarlet hose with the gold clocks,” on a particular day on which he was desirous of giving the French Ambassador “an extraordinary idea of his magnificence!”

This idea would never have entered the head of his great predecessor Henry VIII., of whom Stowe, the tailor, says:—“You shall understand that Henry VIII. did only wear cloth hose, or hose cut out of ell-broad taffeta, unless by great chance there came a pair of silk stockings from Spain. King Edward VI.,” he adds, “had a pair of Spanish silk stockings sent him as a great present.”

While upon these times I may add, that when Elizabeth made Knights of the Garter those great noblemen, the Duc de Montmorenci, and the Lords Burleigh, Chandos, Essex, and Grey of Wilton, the Queen distinguished her favourite Burleigh from the rest, by buckling the garter about his knee herself; and this is said to have been the first occasion on which this personal favour was conferred by the hands of a female sovereign, and to have given rise to the exclamation, first uttered by the offended prudes, of “’Ods Stars and Garters!”

I have read somewhere of stockings made out of the human hair, and how the pretty conceit was adopted by lovers who were willing to entangle their legs, as well as heart, in their mistresses’ tresses. To be once more statistical and useful, I have to add for your information, that although we no longer export anything but cotton yarns, instead of the manufactured article, to Saxony, our general export is still large; saving of silk stockings, of which we send abroad annually only some 60,000 pairs. Two hundred and fifty thousand dozen pairs of cotton stockings go abroad annually to deck foreign legs, and about half that amount of worsted,—the latter being generally sold by weight. Finally, I conclude with the remarkably interesting statistical fact, that a lady always takes off her left stocking last!

The possibility that this bit of statistical darning may excite a blush on susceptible cheeks, reminds me of another fashion to which I will now advert, under the title at the head of the following chapter. Having got down to the feet, and shoes having been already incidentally noticed, we will again mount upward.

“MASKS AND FACES.”

“Il faut ôter les masques des choses aussi bien que des
personnes.”—MONTAIGNE.

Francis Bacon somewhere remarks that politeness veils vice just as dress masks wrinkles. Perhaps this saying of his was founded on the circumstance, that Queen Elizabeth not only wore dresses of increasing splendour with increasing age, but that she also used occasionally to appear masked on great gala occasions. The mode thus royally given, was not however very speedily or generally followed. The introduction of masks as a fashion appears to have “obtained,” as old authors call it, only about the year 1660. Pepys, in 1663, says that he went to the Royal Theatre, and there saw Howard’s comedy of ‘The Committee’ (known to us in its new form and changed name of ‘The Honest Thieves’). He designates it as “a merry but indifferent play, only Lacy’s part, an Irish footman, is beyond imagination.” Among the company were Viscount Falkenberg, or Falconbridge, with his wife, the third daughter of Cromwell. “My Lady Mary Cromwell,” he goes on to say, “looks as well as I have known her, and well clad; but when the house began to fill, she put on her vizard, and so kept it on all the play; _which of late is become a great fashion_ among the ladies, which hides their whole face. So,” he adds,—and it shows, does that sighed-forth “_So!_” the melancholy consequence of leading wives into temptation,—“So to the Exchange, to buy things, with my wife; among others a vizard for herself.”

Certainly that pretty precisian, Mary Cromwell, in a vizard at the play, sounds oddly; one would as soon expect to hear of Mrs. Chisholm at a Casino! No wonder Mrs. Pepys admired her!

But Mrs. Pepys was not very long content with her English vizard; for six months after we find the little man, her husband, recording—“To Covent Garden, to buy a maske at the French house, Madame Charett’s, for my wife.” The taste of Mrs. Pepys was doubtless influenced by the example of the court, “where six women, my Lady Castlemaine and Duchess of Monmouth being two of them, and six men, the Duke of Monmouth, and Lord Arran, and Monsieur Blanfort (Lord Feversham) being three of them, in vizards, but most rich and antique dresses, did dance admirably and most gloriously.” What Pepys thought of the fashion and the time is seen again by a sighing comment—“God give us cause to continue the mirth!”

The fashion was still in full force in 1667; and to what purpose it was used, and to what purpose it might be abused, may be seen in the following extract.

“To the King’s House to ‘The Maid’s Tragedy,’ but vexed all the while with two talking ladies and Sir Charles Sedley; yet pleased to have their discourse, he being a stranger. And one of the ladies would and did sit with her mask on through all the play; and, being as exceeding witty as ever I heard woman, did talk most pleasantly with him; _but_ was, _I believe, a virtuous woman, and of quality_. He would fain know who she was, but she would not tell; yet did give him many pleasant hints of her knowledge of him, by that means setting his brains at work to find out who she was, and did give him leave to use all means to find out who she was but pulling off her mask. He was mighty witty, and she also making sport with him very inoffensively, that a more pleasant _rencontre_ I never heard;” and then once more a groaning commentary,—“but by that means lost the pleasure of the play wholly.”

In the following year Pepys makes record of his having been at Bartholomew Fair with his wife and a party. We “took a link,” he says, “the women resolving to be dirty, and walked up and down to get a coach; and my wife being a little before me, had like to have been taken up by one whom we saw to be Sam Hartlib. My wife had her vizard on; yet we cannot say that he meant any hurt; for it was just as she was by a coach-side, which he had, or had a mind to take up: and he asked her, ‘Madam, do you go in this coach?’ but as soon as he saw a man come to her (I know not whether he knows me) he departed away apace.” By all which we may see that a vizard at a fair was evidently “an outward and visible sign,” recognized by the rakes and gallants of the locality.

A vizard in the Park, at dusk, was equally intelligible; and though the men were not masked at that or any other hour, they were at that time and place more than sufficiently disguised. “And _now_,” says Vincent, in Sir George Etherege’s comedy of ‘Love in a Wood, or St. James’s Park,’—“now a man may carry a bottle under his arm, instead of his hat, and no observing, spruce fop will miss the cravat that lies on one’s shoulder, or count the pimples on one’s face.” As at park and fair, so fell the convenient covering into evil application at the play itself. The matter is alluded to by the Widow Blackacre in the epilogue to the ‘Plain Dealer:’—

“For as in Hall of Westminster
Sleek sempstress vends amid the Courts her ware;
So while we bawl, and you in judgement sit,
The visor-mask sells linen too i’ the pit.”

By the end of the seventeenth century the fashion of masks was being tarnished by vulgarity; and the practice of concluding comedies with a ‘Marriage in a Mask,’ a ceremony which may not have been unusual, was already considered as a stale device. Congreve winds up two of his comedies, ‘The Old Bachelor’ and ‘Love for Love,’ with this jovial sort of bouquet.

The mode however still held on at the theatre. The latter was never more licentious than now, and the ladies never so much loved to resort thither. Our great grandmothers however, when young, were extremely modest: many of them were afraid of venturing to a new play till their lovers assured them they might do so without offence to their exquisite delicacy. The bolder spirits, still modest but impatient, went in masks,—not unwilling to listen to savoury uncleanness, but so modest that they could not bear any one to see that they did _not_ blush at it. “Such incidents as these,” says the ‘Spectator,’ “make some ladies wholly absent themselves from the playhouse; and others never miss the first night of a new play, lest it should prove too luscious to admit of their going with any countenance to the second;”—a most exquisite reason. It was good enough however to authorize vizards; and the theatre became something like what Nat Lee in his ‘Nero’ describes Mount Ida to have been,—

“Where the gods meet and dance in masquerade!”

But Mount Ida had something divine about it, which our stage in the days of vizards certainly had not. As Joe Haines said to his masked audience, in the concluding lines of the prologue to the very play just named—

“All tragedies, egad! to me sound oddly;
I can no more be serious than you godly.”

The fashion, after it had been indifferently well worn by the ladies, of course fell to their maids, and Abigail wore the vizard which Lady Betty dropped. In Malcolm’s ‘London’ (eighteenth century) a writer is quoted, whose communication shows whither the masks had fallen in 1731. It is in a letter on “Boxing Day,” and in it occurs the following passage:—“My friend next carried me to the upper end of Piccadilly, where, one pair of stairs over a stable, we found near a hundred people of both sexes (_some masked_, others not), a great part of which were dancing to the music of two sorry fiddles. It is impossible to describe this medley of mortals fully; however, I will do it as well as I can. There were footmen, servant-maids, butchers, apprentices, oyster and orange women, and sharpers, which appeared to be the best of the company. This horrid place seemed to be a complete nursery for the gallows. My friend informed me it was called ‘a threepenny hop;’ and while we were talking, to my great satisfaction, by order of the Westminster justices, _to their immortal honour_, entered the constables and their assistants, who carried off all the company that was left; and had not our friend been known to them, we might have paid dear for our curiosity.”

After all, Justice was here, as usual, uncommonly blind; for the boxing party, masked or not, was not more offensive against _bonos mores_ than the Ranelagh parties, where powdered “bloods” percolated their dreadfully luscious nonsense through the filter on the faces of the masked “belles.” And besides, masking at holiday-time had long been a privilege of the people. In ‘Vox Graculi’ (1623), above a century prior to the last date, I find it stated of Twelfth Night—“On this night, much masking in the Strand, Cheapside, Holborn, and Fleet-street.”

I have already noticed how our exceedingly precious grandmothers used to resort to the theatres with covered faces instead of stopped-up ears. The ears of the public did however rise angrily at last; the palled appetite loathed the long-served food. A society was formed “for the reformation of manners, for immoral words and expressions _contra bonos mores_, uttered on the stage.” The society retained hired informers, who sat in the pit, took down the naughty words and the names of the speakers, and then entered a prosecution against the utterers. They were driving a pretty trade, for the benefit of modesty and the suppression of masks, when all at once Queen Anne, sipping her hollands, gently bethought herself that these spies were flourishing by the abundance of that which they feigned desire to put down; and indeed the fellows were like some of our professional missionaries of the _pavé_, who steal spoons from chop-houses, and have as many wives as Rugantino. The Queen accordingly crushed the trading prosecutions by a “Nolle prosequi,” and took the matter into her own hands. She issued a “royal command” for the better regulation of the theatres, whereby she left to her Master of the Revels “the special care that nothing be acted in either of the theatres contrary to religion or good manners, upon pain of our high displeasure, and of being silenced from further acting.”

Now, leaving to a Master of the Revels the care of suppressing revelry on the stage, was very much like entrusting to Satan the suppression of sin. However, so it was; but her Majesty tore the masks off herself, or rather threatened to do so, as thus:—

“We do hereby strictly command that no person, of what quality soever, presume to go behind the scenes, or come upon the stage, either before or during the acting of any piece; that no woman be allowed or presume to wear a vizard mask in either of the theatres; and that no persons come into either house without paying the price established for their respective places.”

Good Queen Anne issued this decree in the second year of her reign, and it had just the effect that might have been expected. The houses played ‘London Cuckolds’ to vizards of masked ladies, as usual, on the 9th of November; and Pinkethman roared his buffoonery in his booth near Hyde Park during May Fair. What then did her Majesty deem contrary to religion and good manners? Well, I really do not know; but I _do_ know that, in the very year of the decree, she herself had the comedy of ‘Sir Solomon’ acted before her and her ladies at court; and if she could listen to that without a blush, or a mask to conceal the want of it, why she must have construed immorality, and her royal command against it, in a very mild sense indeed.

The ladies were uncommonly angry with their liege mistress Anne for this decree, and the sentiment is exemplified by the song so popular at the Lincoln’s Inn Theatre in 1704,—‘The Misses’ Lamentation, for want of their Vizard Masques at the Theatre.’ The “misses” however, and the matrons too, had long before this indulged in a fashion which was not dropped until long subsequent to the fall of the mask.

About five years after Mrs. Pepys had taken Samuel for her liege lord, that is to say in 1660, she first essayed to add new lustre to her charms by affixing a few “beauty spots” to her face. “This is the first day,” says he, on the 30th of August of the year above named, “that ever I saw my wife wear black patches since we were married.” It was some time before the gentleman could make up his mind to the propriety of wearing these adjuncts to beauty. In October, he expresses his astonishment that even Lord Sandwich should “talk very high how he would have a French cook, and a master of his horse, and his lady and child to wear black patches; which methought was strange, but he has become a perfect courtier.” It was perhaps because the court patronized patches, that Pepys permitted them on his wife. Hitherto the lady had worn them without the marital sanction, but in November we find him saying, “My wife seemed very pretty today, it being the first time I had given her leave to weare a black patch.” And therewith his admiration increased; and some days later, on seeing his wife close to the Princess Henrietta (daughter of Charles I.) at court, on the occasion of a visit she paid to her brother Charles II., as Duchess of Orléans, he remarks: “The Princess Henrietta is very pretty; ... but my wife standing near her, with two or three black patches on, and well-dressed, did seem to me much handsomer than she.”

A century subsequent to this, patches still kissed the cheek of beauty; and as professors taught how to wield the fan, so French essays were “done into English,” and instruction therein given as to the secret of applying them in an artful manner, how to arrange them with the most killing effect, and how to so plant them about the eye that the expression desired should be at once achieved,—whether of proud disdain, amorous languor, or significant boldness. They were the hieroglyphics of vanity and of party spirit; and beaux and politicians read in the arrangement of patches not only the tender but the political principles of the wearer.

Despotism too had something to do with patches. Thus Lady Castlemaine fixed the fashion of mourning, by “forcing all the ladies to go in black, with their hair plain, and without spots.” It is a curious trait of the manners of other times that a royal concubine should order the tiring of honest women. She could hardly have influenced that “comely woman,” the Duchess of Newcastle, who went about, in the second Charles’s time, with a velvet cap, her hair about her ears, “many black patches, because of pimples about her mouth,” naked-necked, and in a black _justaucorps_.

The ladies marked or patched, the gentlemen red-heeled and similarly “nosed,” had no greater delight than in killing time by looking at the “puppets;” and the fashion of these same puppets is a thing of such antiquity and such duration, that I may fairly add a chapter thereon to those through which I have already been accompanied by the courteous and indulgent reader.

PUPPETS FOR GROWN GENTLEMEN.

“They do lie in a basket, Sir; they are o’ the small
players,—and as good as any, none dispraised, for dumb
shows.”—BEN JONSON: _Bartholomew Fair_.

Madame de Puysieux was a witty and vivacious lady. Among her recorded sayings is one that exceedingly well suits me for the nonce. “I would rather,” she said, “be occasionally found looking at puppets than listening to philosophers.”

There was doubtless some reason in this; but the fact is also indubitable, that puppets and philosophy are not so far apart. The latter has often condescended to illustrate the former. The learned and serious Jesuit, Mariantonio Lupi, devoted his brief leisure to writing upon them. The great mathematicians, Commendino d’Urbino and Torniano di Cremona, stooped to play with and perfect them. Le Sage and Piron wrote plays for them. Ben Jonson brought them on the stage. Addison has immortalized them in stately verse; and Haydn seriously addressed himself to composing exquisite music, wherewith to grace their motion. These are but modern illustrations. We shall however presently discover, that the great and gifted men of a very remote antiquity were wont also to turn from the consideration of mighty problems, and carve puppets that should excite ecstasy in the wide world of “the little people.”

Surely there is dignity in a subject treating even of toys that have been in fashion for three thousand years, and have afforded amusement to two-thirds of the human race. The subject was largely discussed in France not many years since, by M. Charles Magnin, a gentleman who, in love with his plaything, had recourse to every source of information, and who brought away from all something worth knowing. M. Magnin shows that the gravest of authors are at issue as to the origin of the puppet race. Charles Nodier, however, traces it to the doll that lies in unconscious felicity in the arms of youthful and precocious maturity. M. Magnin maintains, on the other hand, that the puppet does not spring from the hearth, but from the altar. The rude god whittled out of a gnarled bough is, with him, the undoubted sire of the universe of dolls. The puppet served for pious, before it was suited to domestic, purposes; and it excited awe long before it won laughter or excited admiration. It lived in a wood, and ruled savages. As civilization advanced, it changed its habits, form, and features; and, ceasing to affright man, undertook the happier task of amusing him.

Such is the legendary record of puppets. We must turn over the graphic pages of the ‘Father of History,’ to find the first authentic mention of their employment. The guests at an Egyptian feast, when they grew hilarious, were called back to sober propriety by the exhibition of a little skeleton, and the admonition to reflect upon the lesson it conveyed. The British Museum possesses many of these figures, as well as others which appear to be toys that have been buried with their loved little owners. There is some uncertainty on this point, however; for it is known that on diseased persons it was the custom to place little figures, supposed to represent the deity which had particular influence over the part whereon the image was laid. I believe that the liver was the only portion of the body that had not its peculiar divinity. That obstinate organ has always defied gods and men. “In jecore nigro nascuntur domini;” and over these even the Egyptian Pantheon availed nothing.

Whether the figures in our Museum be actual toys, or counterfeit presentments of very swarthy gods, it is not in every instance easy to determine. From conjecture however we can turn to Herodotus; and certainly that worthy Halicarnassian tells us, in his second book, that in Egypt, on the festival of Osiris, or Bacchus, a puppet figure of the joyous god, a cubit in height, with some indecent mechanism moved by the pulling of a string, was carried in procession by the women. When previously speaking of the figure of Pan, he says, that the deity in question is worshiped under a form known not to be his real one, for a reason, he adds, which he “had rather not mention.” So, in the case of Bacchus, he confines himself to stating that there were “sacred and mysterious reasons” for the same. We are now aware that the unseemly practice was really a species of invocation that the earth might be impregnated with prolific virtue.

We next arrive at articulated figures. The statue of Jupiter Ammon nodded to the attendant priests when he was about to prophesy. So Apollo, at Heliopolis, would not open his lips till his ministers had carried him whither he would go. Aloft on the shoulders of his bearers, he guided them as with reins. On being questioned, he graciously bowed his head, if he approved; or fell back, if he dissented. When placed on the ground of his temple, he was seen to ascend, without aid, till his head touched the roof; and there he remained fixed till prayers brought him down again. It is suggested that the magnet may have been employed to accomplish the feat. How this may have been defies aught but conjecture.

Voluntary motion of inanimate objects was always an evidence of their divinity. When Juno paid her celebrated visit to Vulcan, she found him engaged in the manufacture of tripods, which moved about and performed their office with a bustling air of the most zealous assiduity.

“Full twenty tripods for his hall he framed,
That, placed on living wheels of massy gold,
Wondrous to tell, instinct with spirit, roll’d
From place to place around the blest abodes,
Self-moved, obedient to the beck of gods.”

We have here in England, if not tripods, at least bipeds, who can

“instinct with spirit roll
From place to place.”

And this subject reminds me of Bacchus, generally. Now, my readers know that there were of old not less than ten cities known by the name of Nysa. At two of these, Nysa in India and Nysa in Ethiopia, Bacchus (Dio Nysus) was held in extreme reverence. In the last-named city, Ptolemy Philadelphus manifested his veneration for the god, by honouring the deity’s great festival after a pleasing fashion. The King had a figure of the joyous divinity made expressly for the occasion. It was eight cubits in length, and was drawn through the city, attired in a tunic of yellow and gold, with a Macedonian mantle hanging from the shoulders. The god was seated in a car, and as he passed through the gazing crowds, he ever and anon majestically arose, poured out, not wine, but milk, from a bowl, and then solemnly re-seated himself.

Among the Greeks, Dædalus is famous, in legend at least, as the founder of the art of figure-making. He is said to have flourished about a thousand years before Christ; and despite what is generally told of him, he was probably but a rude craftsman. He was the first who introduced quicksilver into figures, and by this process he lent a sort of Chinese-tumbling motion to a wooden image of Venus. Some of his figures were so given to activity as to require being made fast when not wanted to move, without which precaution they would, like the leg in the legend, have continued running about without intermission.

All the Greek puppets belong to the Dædalus school; they were generally of wood or baked clay, were set in motion by strings, and were invariably of the feminine gender. It was customary to place them in the coffins of young girls. M. Magnin quotes from Xenophon’s graphic description of the banquet in the house of Callias, to demonstrate that the noblest Athenians condescended to be amused with representations by puppets. There is however not a word touching puppets throughout the lively narrative of the learned and gallant Greek. The Syracusan showman therein introduced exhibits a living boy and girl, who go through some rather dangerous gymnastic exercises, which excite considerable disgust in the mind of Socrates. That sage is much better pleased when the graceful pair represent in his presence the ballet of ‘Bacchus and Ariadne.’ These children not only danced but sang; and if it be suggested that the feat of singing might easily be contrived for a puppet by a clever stage-manager, we may also suggest that the Syracusan speaks, on one occasion, in answer to Socrates, so plainly as to leave no doubt that “flesh, blood, and blue veins” entered into the composition of his elegant little slave.

Antiochus Cyzenicus, half-brother to Antiochus Grypus—the huge-nosed Antiochus—was celebrated as the inventor of puppets as well as of larger machines; and his counterfeit animals, whose limbs simulated motion, were as agreeable to his friends, as his engines, with unpronounceable names, were horridly distasteful to his enemies.

In Greece again, Archytas the mathematician constructed for his young acquaintances a hollow pigeon that could fly,—the original Montgolfier. In like manner, Dædalus, who made quicksilvered tumblers, also discovered the use of the wedge and the science of sailing; while Cnidus, the great astronomer, not only regulated the year and brought the celestial sphere from Egypt, but made all his little cousins glad by the excellence of the puppets he invented, and the fantasticness of their movements.

The public puppet-plays were fashionable in Greece after the theatres had been suppressed by the Puritan Macedonian faction. The method of representation was, in many respects, like that still followed by the itinerant managers of wooden companies in our own days. The like permanence of fashion has clung to our childish games. The old _Muinda_ is the modern Blind-Man’s-Buff; _Chytrinda_ is Hot Cockles; _Trigodiphasis_ is Bob-Cherry; and Scriblerus, we remember, permitted his illustrious son to play at Puss-in-the-Corner, for the sufficient reason that it was the _Apodidascinda_ of the ancients. There is one classical game that has gone out of fashion, and I am not altogether surprised at it, seeing that it consisted in one of the players standing on a round ball, with his neck in a noose hung from above; in one hand he held a knife. It was the part of his opponents to kick the ball from under his feet. If, when this was done, he succeeded in cutting the rope, he won the game; if not, he lost it, and got hanged.

To return to our figures, we may state that the Italian temples were celebrated for their moving gods. In the fane of the two Fortunes at Antium, the goddess moved both arms and head when that solemnity was required. So at Præneste, the figures of the youthful Jupiter and Juno, lying in the lap of Fortune, moved, and excited awe thereby. The marble Servius Tullius is said to have shaded his eyes with his cold hand whenever that remarkably strong-minded woman, his daughter and murderess, passed before him.

It was a common thing for the images of the gods to turn away their heads when displeased with the meats placed before them. This act filled a whole district with terror, and excited a desire in the people to do whatever the priests enjoined. When the Athenians were slow to desert their capital and take to their ships, the sacred wooden dragon of Minerva not only refused to eat his cakes, but rolled himself out of the temple and down into the sea, as though to indicate to the people the direction in which resided safety. As for the huge puppets used in religious processions, nothing now exists like them, save in some of the festival processions in Flemish towns. Our venerable city brethren, Gog and Magog, are the ancient freemen of that guild. In some of the smaller images our worthy friend Punch figures with his wonted _éclat_. M. Magnin holds that the French _Polichinelle_ is not a descendant of the puppet with the Phrygian bonnet, but an image caricaturing some old boasting cuirassed captain of Gascony. The breast protuberance he considers to be merely an exaggeration of the bowed cuirass,—an explanation which I am far from feeling bound to honour with acceptance.

Puppets found favour at the hands of the early Fathers of the Church: perhaps for the reason that more decency was observed in the speeches of the shows than in those of the stage. The Fathers however were divided on the point. Some advocated the use of every and any means whereby religion could be furthered; others declared that nothing was lawful but what was in itself holy. The fashion nevertheless prevailed, and allegorical figures became common. The Fish, the Lamb, the Good Shepherd, and similar representations gladdened the hearts of simple people, till the Church planted her canons against them exclusively, and insisted upon the adoption of figures of the Saviour in his human form.