A CHAPTER ON SHOES. BY MRS. WHITE, However uninteresting at first sight our theme may appear, the early existence of these necessary articles of dress, their use in barbarous as well as civilized countries, the variety of materials employed in their manufacture, and the mutations of form to which fashion has subjected them, may afford us matter for a chapter less literally "leather and prunella" than it promises. Egypt, that nurse- land of science and the mechanical arts, probably afforded the type of the Jewish shoes; the first mention of which we find in reference to the institution of the passover. Sandals, which in all European countries preceded the use of the shoe, are not mentioned in scripture till afterwards; and it was probably only ladies or kings and priests that appropriated them. How costly and beautiful these were sometimes made, we may gather from the effect of those worn by Judith upon Holofernes, whose eyes were said to be ravished with the sight of them; or more probably with that of the delicate foot entangled in the embroidery and other ornamental work with which they were occasionally enriched. The shoes of the Israelites were tied with thongs, which passed under the soles of the feet, and were either made of leather, linen, rush, or wood; precisely the materials which, by an examination of the mouldering remains of shoes and sandals in the wall-cases of the Egyptian room of the British Museum, we find were made use of by the ancient inhabitants of Thebes and Memphis. The practice of putting off the shoes in holy places (an act of veneration continued by the Turks and other Eastern nations to this day) is as old as the time of Moses. It was also a sign of mourning and humiliation to take them off; but to perform this office for another became a token of degradation*. To bear another's shoes, or even to untie them, was considered meanest offices, hence the humility of the phrase, "Whose shoe-latchet I am not worthy to unloose;" and these services were only performed by slaves, who were also employed on great occasions to carry their owners' sandals in cases, ready for them to put on when they made their appearance in state. The Jewish soldiers, we are told, were shod with brass and iron; and the Grecian warriors Occasionally wore only the heel covered with a half shoe of this metal, bound with straps of leather on the leg. The ordinary Greek shoe reached to the middle of the leg, and was made of various * Deut. xxxv. 9. materials; but women of condition sandals. wore The calceus of the Romans, which was worn with the toga when they went abroad, somewhat resembled our shoes, covering the whole foot, and was tied above with strings or latchets; but within doors, at feasts, or on a journey, they wore the solea or slipper, which only protected the sole of the foot, and was fastened with leather thongs; but it was estecmed effeminate to appear in public with these substitutes. Like the Lacedemonians, the Roman ladies sometimes wore red shoes, and at others white ones; but magistrates also wore them red at the celebration of triumphs and on days of ceremony. The citizens generally wore black shoes, beaux purple ones, while senators and patricians, with their fami lies, carried the sign of their rank, in the shape of a crescent, which served as buckles to the shoes, and were called "'calcia lunati." The slaves, who wore no shoes, were nicknamed, from their dusty feet, cretati; and it is recorded that Phocion and Cato Aticensis, either upon principle or for the sake of singularity, went bare-foot. The tocs of the Roman shoes were turned up at the point, and were called from this circumstance calcia rostrati. These points, the red shoes of state, and the singularities affected by the dandies of old Rome, have all, as we shall find, parallels in the history of France and England; in both of which countries the eccentricities of caprice appear to have been exercised, if not exhausted, on this article. When the Romans first invaded Britain, they found the inhabitants wearing no other shoes than a piece of the skin of a horse, or cow, or other animal, tied about the feet with the hair outward; a description that somewhat reminds us of the single shoe of the rude warriors described by Virgil, as joining the army of Turnus: The left foot naked when they marched to fight, But in a bull's raw hide they sheath the right." And again, Xenephon informs us that the Ten Thousand Grecks who had followed the young Cyrus, being without shoes in their retreat, which however occasioned them great inconwere forced to cover their feet with raw skins, venience. Even in the ninth and tenth centuries the greatest princes of Europe wore wooden shoes, very similar to the shoes worn by the men in or the upper part of leather and the sole wood, China at the present day, specimens of which (but having the upper part of silk) may be seen in the Crystal Palace, in Hyde Park, Nothing can be more clumsy than the shoes of Harold and his attendants, as represented in the Bayeux tapestry; and there is no doubt that the common people continued to wear shoes of untanned leather-such as may be found in Kerry and other parts of Ireland at this day long after the Norman conquest. Froissart, in his inventory of the spoil taken by Edward the Third in his first expedition to Scotland, upon the retreat of the Scotch from Stanhope Forest, mentions, among a variety of other items, ten thousand shoes, or brogues, made of raw hide; and these brogues the Scotch kernes, like the Irish Rapparees, continued to wear, in lieu of more modern improvements, till comparatively recent times; nay, we doubt not that makers of them may still be found in the Highlands of Scotland as well as in the wilder districts of Ireland. With the Norman conquest came a revolution in the form and finish of the shoe, and we may almost presume the date of French fashions in England to have commenced with this epoch; certain it is that in the succeeding reign the first pointed ones made their appearance, and flourished in an extraordinary manner under the auspices of a great beau of the court of William Rufus, who obtained the sobriquet of Robert the Horned, from the long and sharp points appended to his shoes, and which were stuffed with tow, and twisted like a ram's horn. Whether there was any truth in the whisper, which attributed the innovation to a deformity of the inventor's foot (just as the ruff is said to have covered a wen, and the patch a pimple) we have means of discovering; but the rumour remains en evidence. At any rate, fashion appears to have been just as obsequeous to its leaders' follies then as now, and henceforth its votaries made a point of turning up their toes to the acmé of the ridiculous and unnatural. no These shoes were called "pigacia," and the points occasionally described a scorpion's tail; the boots affected the same peculiarities, and were denominated ocrea rostrate; and both were inveighed against in very severe terms by the clergy of the period. Long and pointed shoes without heels, and having a square opening over the instep, were worn in the time of Henry the First; and in that of Henry the Second they began to be beautified with embroidery; for Matthew Paris, in describing the interment of this monarch, represents him arrayed in kingly robes, with a golden crown upon his head, gloves on his hands, and his feet encased in boots wrought with gold. King John appears to have indulged a more classic taste than his predecessors, for in an inventory of his dress nothing makes a finer show than his sandals of purple cloth fretted with gold; but these were probably reserved for state occasions. Up to this period we find nothing said of coloured shoes; but at the marriage of Margaret, Henry the Third's daughter, with the king of Scots, the nobility who attended the wedding wore shoes embroidered in chequers. Embroidered shces, according to "Herbé's Costumes Français," had indeed been used in France as early as the time of Charlemagne ; and it is curious that amongst all the variations of form and fashion to which our subject has succumbed, that this mode of ornamenting them is still in vogue; affording our sex an elegant employment in one of the most useful forms on which the mysteries of tent and cross stitch can be expended. But This style of decoration remained in great favour through the successive reigns of the Edwards; and under the auspices of the beautiful Queen Philippa and her magnificent lord, the buds and blossoms of needlework blazed with jewels, and whole patterns were sometimes wrought upon the shoe or boot in precious stones. Though the beaked shoe remained in the end of it the mode changed, as we may fashion in the early part of this reign, towards perceive by those represented on the tomb of Edward the Third, in Westminster, and on the effigy of the Black Prince at York. fashion soon veered back to the old form; and, as if in revenge for their previous curtailment, the points of the shoes shot out in the two succeeding reigns to a more than ever extravagant length, till in that of Richard the Second it became necessary to fasten them to the knees, to prevent their tripping up their wearers. Out of this grew the necessity of a new gande for luxury, in the shape of chains of gold or silver gilt, for the purpose of attaching them to the knees; laces were also used for this purpose; but as a law was subsequently passed, forbidding the wearing of them under forfeiture of twenty shillings, in consequence of their incumbering people in walking, we may imagine their effect on slovenly or shabby persons, and the result which must naturally have occurred from any derangement of these artificial extremities. In Chaucer's time some of these shoes had the upper part cut in imitation of church-windows; and amongst the British antiquities in the Royal Museum, we observed some (found on the Thames banks) of the reigns of Edward the Fourth and Henry the Eighth, which were perforated very curiously, but of a totally dif ferent shape from those of the Plantagenet era. The constancy of the English to their points, which not even an Act of Parliament could put down, nor the declamations of the clergy render unpopular, was matched on the other side of the Channel by the extravagant whims indulged in by the beaux of the court of Charles the Fifth, who not only wore their shoes embroidered in colours and adorned with gold and pearls and precious stones, but they sometimes carried caprice so far as to appear with a boot on one foot and a shoe on the other, or with one white shoe and the other black. Meantime sermons were preached, and satires written, with a view to the destruction of the Crackowses; for so were the pointed shoe of In Catholic countries, St. Crispin has still his fête day, which was formerly kept in England, where the members of the guild walked in procession, and in some places were expected to perform a play at their own expense. WAT. And who did for these shoes pay? Richard the Second's time called; and it is not! a little amusing to hear the vehemence with which some authors of the period inveighed against them. "Their shoes and pattens," remarks the writer of the "Elogium," are snouted and piked more than a finger long, crooking up- But to return to shoes themselves. Though wards, resembling devils' claws, and fastened to the the varieties of points and gold chains had been knees with chains of gold and silver. Nor were the removed, the round-toed shoes of Henry the other denouncers of this ridiculous fashion less Eighth's time were not less magnificently decosincere in their disgust, or more polite in the ex-rated than those of their predecessors. Witness pression of it. But the points held out, or rather the description of Cardinal Wolsey's, which lengthened out; for in the reign of Henry the William Roy, the satirist, has left us— Sixth we find then grown amazingly, and some of the bottines of that period have beaks so at"Besides this, to tell thee more news, He hath a pair of costly shoes, tenuated as to resemble the point of a needle. Which seldom touch any ground : For three centuries did this preposterous mode They are so goodly and curious, exist, in spite of the "bulls of popes, the deAll of gold and stones precious, crees of councils, and the declamations of the Costing many a thousand pound." clergy." Even the act of Parliament which prohibited the use of boots or shoes with pikes exceeding two inches in length, and rendered shoemakers punishable if they infringed this rule, was perfectly insufficient to deter the manufacture or the wearing of them, till at length the point of the boot became a point of religion, and the awful sentence of excommunication was fulminated against all who wore them above the parliamentary length. The pain of cursing by the clergy, in those days of ignorance and superstition, carried terrors which the law had not; and instead of awakening comparisons between the cause and the curse, and forcing on men's minds the natural inferences that follow, the most infatuated exquisite found himself at last reduced to the necessity of abjuring the literally long-contended point, and obliged to wear, compulsion," the regulation pike, or go without. Under these circumstances, it is no wonder that we find the shoes of the latter part of the reign of Edward the Fourth, only a few years subsequent to the putting forth of this threat, entirely devoid of this extraordinary ornament. 66 on Sixty-six years previous to the suppression of this fantastic mode, the Cordwainers' Company had been incorporated in London (1410). It was so called from the shoemakers using Cordova leather (a goat-skin called Cordoban), the manufacture of which had been acquired from the Moors, and was excelled in by the inhabitants of that city. This was also (and from the same cause) the statute name of the shoemakers in France, who in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries formed a society, called " Frères Cordonniers," under the patronage of St. Crispin. The 25th of October still appears amongst the high tides in the calendar, as the anniversary of this saint, who, it is said, came with his brother Crispinian from Rome to Soissons, in France, for the purpose of preaching christianity, where, being desirous of preserving their independence, they worked at the craft of shoemaking, and hence are esteemed the patrons of the trade. They were beheaded about the year 308. But even previous to this, the craft could boast of saintly members; for, according to Butler, St. Anianus, a contemporary of St. Mark, was also one of the fraternity, To be eased of his visitation." In the reign of Queen Mary we find the round toes spreading in a lateral direction to such an extent, that it became necessary to issue a proclamation to prevent the wearing of shoes more than six inches square at the toes! Nor was the fashion confined to England. In its head quarters, under the auspices of François the First, we are told that they were "les souliers dégagés très larges souvent même très carrés du bout." White shoes were at this period worn by English ladies, and in the curious old ballad of "Greensleeves"-*the tune of which Shakspeare twice refers in his Merry Wives of Windsor"-the slighted lover, enumerating the various gifts with which he had sought to win the Lady Greensleeves' regards, mentions "Crimson stockings, all of silk, With gold all wrought above the knee, Thy pumps as white as was the milk, And yet thou wouldest not love me." "GREENSLEEVES, &c." Pumps were then light shoes, "with none or very low heels," and perhaps led the way to the slipper which came into vogue during Elizabeth's reign in 1570, and is frequently mentioned by Shakspeare, who also speaks of boots buckled and laced. From shoes without heels, fashion presently veered round to the opposite extreme, and at the court of Louis the Thirteenth of France we find coloured shoes worn, ornamented with great ears ("de grandes oreilles"), and elevated on heels four or five inches in height, red for court dress. the reign of the luxurious grand monarque: they White shoes grew popular at Versailles during were ornamented with rosettes, or immense ties of blue or red ribbon, and were high-heeled as those of the preceding reign. These shoes were afterwards introduced at the court of St. James's, *Published in 66 A Handful of Pleasant Delites," 1584. and, a little modified, are the types of some intended for her Majesty's bal costumé, with a view of which Mr. Pattison, of Oxford-street, kindly favoured us. Even so late as 1751, in the reign of George the Second, this mode was retained by the gallants and courtiers; and Lord Chesterfield, in one of his clever, heartless letters to his son, in which he writes him a homily on the fashion of his clothes, remarks that at his age it was as ridiculous not to be very well dressed as at his own it would be to wear a white feather and red-heeled shocs. the Princess Charlotte into the mysteries of St. Crispin's craft. Amateur shoemaking exists no longer; ladies are satisfied with ornamenting their shoes, without encroaching on the privilege of the manufacturers. And as kid and enamelled leather are as easily embroidered as satin or canvass, a great deal may be done to render shoes of these materials effective. Nothing can exceed the beautiful appearance of gold or silver threads on coloured, white, or bronzed leather, or would be more in kceping with the present almost oriental magnificence of evening dress. From the decline of this fashion our subject loses all that was picturesque in its historyThe clicker would cut out the material, the square toes and buckles, the very antithesis of lady or her employé embroider it; it would then white kid, and cherry-coloured roses, and high be handed to the binder to close and bind; then red heels. Mark the next revolution, and hence- it would pass into the maker's hands to be forth-except the alternations from long to short soled; another hand would probably paste in quarters, high and low fronts, wood heels and the sock or lower lining; and another scrape, no heels, with variations from half an inch to pipeclay, and finish off the sole to the smoothtwo inches in the width of the toe-there has ness and polish desired. The wages of a good been no distinguishing character in the pedal shoemaker in a first-rate house averages, we are adornments of these latter days. Just now told, £2 per week. In the season £2 10s. is an effort is being made to add an inch to the sometimes earned; but in the cheaper houses, feminine stature by the addition of what are where the work is slighter, and the materials called military heels, the effect of which has low priced, the earnings are very considerably been long approved of in foot regiments. There diminished. A well-made double-soled pair of is also a tendency to restore the roses of the Re- ladies'-boots will take a man a day to make; storation on full dress shoes and undress slip-with single soles and light work, he may, if he pers. Witness those worn by the President of be a quick hand, make three pair. In the same the French at his late state ball, and their ap- way, the binding varies with the description of pearance at polkas and quadrille parties through- article, and the house for which the women out the winter. Moreover, only Cinderella's work-full-priced houses pay fourteen, fifteen, slippers could be more exquisite than some we and sixteen-pence per pair for boot-binding, the have just been shown, of the Duchess of cheaper ones five-pence, while shoes fetch only S-th-rl-d's, in one pair of which the lilac's half this money. Some women employed in the leaf and blossom make the fronts and backs, bespoke shoe-warehouses are enabled to make a and are mingled in the rosette on the instep. guinea a-week at their business; medium hands workers not less than 8s. The sewing of the average from 10s. to 15s.; and the ordinary lighter shoes, and stitching of boots- after the leather has been "stabbed" (as it is technically called) with a little machine, which, being passed for the fine and close stitches, which adds so much along like a paste-cutter, punctures the holes to the strength and neatness of what are called goloshed boots, in which the front pieces are continued along some portion or the whole of the sides-is also the work of women; and thus where a man and his wife are industrious, and work together, a very comfortable and remunerating income can be made. But the great complaint of masters is the small dependence to be placed on the workmen. We hail all elaboration in these delicate helps to luxury, because they must necessarily employ additional hands in a business which even at present affords an important source of occupation to women, who, besides the binding and sewing of the lighter kinds of shoes, would have the task of trimming them also. At one period, shoemaking was not confined to the Cordwainers' Company. Ladies, at the commencement of the present century, took lessons in the art, and worked at it-not, of course, after the primitive fashion of the regular practitioners, who, with very soiled shirt-sleeves rolled above the elbow, sit bent double on their low seats over last and lapstone-but with all the apparatus refined and beautified, and so conveniently arranged, that not even d'Egville's self could fear for the shoulders of the fair workwomen; all the requisites having a proper place assigned them at a work-table fitted up for the purpose, to which the block was attached by a machine contrived upon the principle of the screw-cushion, Mackay, of Clifford-street, Bond-street, was then famous for his five-guinea lessons, and the numbers of his aristocratic and fashionable pupils; and the celebrated Ralph still lives, who had the honour of initiating the royal fingers of Irregular habits may in a great measure accrue from their working at their own houses, instead of under the eye of a master, which necessarily has a great effect in producing habits of punctuality and good workmanship. We fear ladies'-shoes see the inside of many deplorable dwellings before they rest on silken ottomans, or press the piles of Aubuson and Axminster. There is one feature of shoemaking, *For these particulars we are indebted to Mr. Pattison and Mr. Bird, of Oxford-street, picturesque now from its very oddity, but which in bygone days was almost as common in our streets as in those of Rome during the reign of Domitian, when the emperor had them cleared away by proclamation-we mean the cobbler's-stalls, only a very few of which survive the dearth of repairs consequent on the moderate price of modern shoes. We never pass that one at the corner of Store-street (shared, by the way, with a speculative tailor) without being reminded of the brother of Curran, who whenever John Philpot refused to find subsidies for his inveterate course of extravagant dissipation, raised such a stall against the blank wall which fronted the councillor's house in London, and in the largest of all large letters informed the passers-by that "ladies' and gentlemen's repairs were neatly executed" by a "Curran." We remember to have seen one many years ago, under the shade of a green tree, on the upper part of Tower-hill, and to have heard (for even cobbler's-stalls have their tragedies) that on the occasion of Sir Francis Burdett's commitment to the Tower, when a riot was looked for amongst the thousands that thronged the hill, and some confusion was taken advantage of by the soldiery as a pretext for firing on the mob, that the then inmate of this humble tenement, innocent of all unlawful deeds, but that which cost Eve Eden, fell harmless as a dove falls beneath the shot of the fowler, the undeserving victim of violence and party feeling. But enough of our subject; we have brought our shoes to the cobbler's-stall somewhat prematurely, especially as those in which we have dealt are far too fine to have found their way naturally in that direction. We know that the Germans had their cobbler-bard, and that Alphenus, the after Roman Consul, before he pleaded in courts, worked humbly in his stall; but we have no dignities wherewith to gild this portion of our jottings. THE SONNET.-The unity which characterizes a good sonnet imparts to it a majesty and might which even the noblest thoughts cannot possess if allowed, as in philosophical poetry they generally are, to run into a series, and thus to become merged into each other, as parts subordinated to a whole. A true sonnet is a complete whole. It hangs selfbalanced on its centre, and, for a thoughtful reader, teems forth perpetually a new face to the light of truth. It issues from the contemplative even more than from the meditative order of mind, implying a power among the rarest and most arduousthat of resting upon a single idea, and viewing it in all its aspects, rather than that of using it as a stepping-stone to other ideas. It requires not less a "shaping" mind, needing, as it does, in the highest degree, that form, without which poetic thought has neither consistence nor permanence; and it is no doubt the more seldom successfully produced, because the contemplative faculty and the shaping art but seldom exist together.-Edinburgh Review. |