Most men, apparently, take their gloves for granted. In these days the little refinements of civilization are accepted among us without a thought; but in so doing we lose a great deal of enjoyment which we never were intended to overlook. Least of all are our gloves commonplace. Mr. Chesterton has something to say about Tremendous Trifles. To my mind, he might have been talking about gloves. If you choose to think of them as trifles, then they are tremendous. For thirty years I have devoted myse

“None other symbol—the cross excepted—has so entered into the feelings and the affections of men, or so ruled and bound in integrity and right the transactions of life, as the glove.”— William S. Beck. It is no unusual thing to meet American women who are connoisseurs of the hand-made laces brought to this country from abroad. Laces, like painting or sculpture, are an object of study; they have been raised to the level of the fine arts. But how often do we come across a woman—it matters not how

“A man plucked off his glove and gave it to his neighbor: and this was for a testimony in Israel.”— Old Testament, Chaldaic Version: Ruth: ch. iv., vs. 7. Gloves are so ancient that the first mention of them in literature is to be found in a great classic of three thousand years ago—the Bible. Zealous disputants in all kinds of causes have had a trick of twisting Holy Writ to serve the purpose of their arguments. But in appropriating the above lines from the Book of Ruth, the writer has not been

“Right, Caxon, right as my glove! By-the-by, I fancy that phrase comes from the custom of pledging a glove as a sign of irrefragable faith.”— The Antiquary : Sir Walter Scott. We are so matter of fact in these days that, rarely, if ever, do we speak in symbols. The elaborate code of the glove has almost entirely dropped out of use. “And speaks all languages the rose,” the poet reminds us, but it is doubtful whether the most romantic of flowers ever conveyed such wealth of meaning, even between t

“A French town ... in which the product of successive ages, not without lively touches of the present, are blended together harmoniously, with a beauty specific —a beauty cisalpine and northern—and of which Turner has found the ideal in certain of his studies of the rivers of France, a perfectly happy conjunction of river and town being of the essence of its physiognomy.”— Deny L’ Auxerrois : Walter Pater. Many centuries ago, certain chieftains of the Allobroges were inspired to plant their litt

How the glove craft of Grenoble spontaneously sprang up, took firm root and grew until it controlled, to a great degree, the fortunes of that city, has been shown in the foregoing brief summary of events. The many phases of life with which glove-making was bound up in mediæval days, its social and economic importance to the community and its pre-eminence among the early industries, cannot have failed to be apparent. From about 1600 the chief city of the Dauphiné underwent an astonishingly rapid

The first glove-makers in Europe, we may suppose—certainly the first, skilled in that art, to work together in brotherhoods—were the monks of the early Middle Ages. In common with many other old-established handicrafts, the glove trade is deeply indebted to the Church. On this point, William S. Beck, the leading English authority on glove lore of thirty-five years ago, has summed up the conditions most interestingly and clearly. He says: “Muscular Christianity is no new doctrine. Faith and works

“There is nothing impossible to industry.”— Clio, one of the Seven Wise Men of Greece. Until now we have been dealing with revolutionary movements in the political sense, and, indirectly, their effects upon the glove trade. We presently have to consider the great revolution within the industry itself, which came with the introduction of machinery in the nineteenth century, whereby productive labor was completely transformed and glove-making permanently modernized. Early in the nineteenth century

“In France, kid-culture is carried to perfection.... To this is due the value of the French skins, which command higher prices than any in the market.”— William S. Beck. No history of gloves would be complete which failed to take into account the old French town of Annonay and its celebrated industry. Annonay has been mentioned several times already in the course of these pages, when the subject of fine French skins was touched upon, and especially in connection with the difficulties which arose

“There’s nothing like leather. Leather is a product of Nature. Take a piece of leather and observe the way the fibres are knit together. It is Nature’s work. It is so wonderful that man cannot hope to reproduce it. He cannot even re-create it. Boil a piece of hide or skin. It will turn to gelatine. No power known to man can turn that gelatine back into leather. Shred it. No machine can reweave the fibres into their former wonderful fabric. Take all the chemicals which go to make up a piece of le

An interesting modern development in glove making, and one which undoubtedly has come to stay, is the vogue of the silk glove whose popularity has grown to surprising proportions. Oddly enough, the first gloves to be introduced into Europe for women in the thirteenth century were made of linen, and were of very simple design. These may be regarded as the ancestor of the chamoisette and cotton doeskins of our day; while the knitted silk, or “purled” hand coverings, worn by the early clergy, sugge