I am confirm’d a woman can
Love this, or that, or any other man:
This day she’s melting hot,
To-morrow swears she knows you not;
If she but a new object find,
Then straight she’s of another mind;
Then hang me, Ladies, at your
door,
If e’er I doat upon
you more.
Yet still I’ll love the fairsome
(why?—
For nothing but to please my eye);
And so the fat and soft-skinned dame
I’ll flatter to appease my flame;
For she that’s musical I’ll
long,
When I am sad, to sing a song;
Then hang me, Ladies, at your
door,
If e’er I doat upon
you more.
I’ll give my fancy leave to range
Through every where to find out change;
The black, the brown, the fair shall be
But objects of variety.
I’ll court you all to serve my turn,
But with such flames as shall not burn;
Then hang me, Ladies, at your
door,
If e’er I doat upon
you more.
A.D.
* * * *
*
The practice of giving white gloves to judges at maiden
assizes is one of the few relics of that symbolism
so observable in the early laws of this as of all
other countries; and its origin is doubtless to be
found in the fact of the hand being, in the early
Germanic law, a symbol of power. By the hand
property was delivered over or reclaimed, hand joined
in hand to strike a bargain and to celebrate espousals,
&c. That this symbolism should sometimes be transferred
from the hand to the glove (the hand-schuh
of the Germans) is but natural, and it is in this
transfer that we shall find the origin of the white
gloves in question. At a maiden assize no criminal
has been called upon to plead, or to use the words
of Blackstone, “called upon by name to hold up
his hand;” in short, no guilty hand has been
held up, and, therefore, after the rising of the court
our judges (instead of receiving, as they did in Germany,
an entertainment at which the bread, the glasses, the
food, the linen—every thing, in short—was
white) have been accustomed to receive a pair of white
gloves. The Spaniards have a proverb, “white
hands never offend;” but in their gallantry
they use it only in reference to the softer sex; the
Teutonic races, however, would seem to have embodied
the idea, and to have extended its application.
WILLIAM J. THOMS.
A LIMB OF THE LAW, to a portion of whose Query, in
No. 2. (p. 29.), the above is intended as a reply,
may consult, on the symbolism of the Hand and Glove,
Grimm Deutsches Rechtsaltherthuemer, pp. 137.
and 152, and on the symbolical use of white in judicial
proceedings, and the after feastings consequent thereon,
pp. 137. 381. and 869. of the same learned work.
[On this subject we have received a communication
from F.G.S., referring to Brand’s Popular
Antiquities, vol. ii. p. 79, ed. 1841, for a passage
from Fuller’s Mixed Contemplations, London,
1660, which proves the existence of the practice at
the time; and to another in Clavell’s Recantation
of an Ill-led Life, London, 1634, to show that
prisoners, who received pardon after condemnation,
were accustomed to present gloves to the judges:—
