Some of the gloves worn by royal personages still exist. We illustrate a glove worn by England’s maiden queen, Elizabeth, and a very ornate affair it is—of fine white leather, profusely embroidered in gold thread, and having a yellow fringe and lined with drab silk. Elizabeth’s hands were very beautiful, we are told, the charm of which she was wont to display by the repeated removal of her gloves. DuMaurier writes how he had heard from his father “that, having been sent to her, at every audience he had with her majesty, she pulled off her gloves more than a hundred times to display her hands, which, indeed, were very beautiful and very white.” Either the royal hands were a deal larger than a lady of our time would care to possess, or they knew not in those days the grace of our perfect-fitting gloves, for those of Elizabeth’s are as much as three and one-half inches across the palm, and have a thumb five inches in length, the entire glove being about a half-yard.

We are told that gloves were not adopted by the gentler sex as a class until after the Reformation. But when once the fashion had taken hold of the feminine mind, they made up by lavish ornamentation what they had lost in time. Gloves of fine leather, with great cuffs elaborately ornamented with exquisite embroidery in rich and delicate silks, wrought with marvelous ingenuity and skill, now became a veritable mania. Lace-trimmed gloves were also worn; and a language of the glove arose, so that a secret correspondence could be carried on by certain knottings of the fringe.

Whatever may be said of the gloves of the past, they are at least picturesque and interesting, as well as varied in style.