72 
NOTES AND QUERIES. 
[No. 5. 
ance is fully traced. 
readers as may feel interested in the subject to 
that volume, and reserving for future numbers a 
long list of other interesting Queries which are 
now before me, it will gratify me to obtain, through 
your medium, any information respecting the MS. 
referred to. I remain, Sir, yours truly, 
Joun Britton. 
[Our modesty has compelled us to omit from this 
letter a warm eulogium on our undertaking, well as 
we know the value of Mr. Britton’s testimony to our 
usefulness, and much as we esteem it. | 
INEDITED SONG BY SIR JOHN SUCKLING. 
I do not remember to have seen the following 
verses in print or even in MS. before I acci- 
dentally met with them in a small quarto MS. 
Collection of English Poetry, in the hand-writing 
of the time of Charles I. They are much in 
Suckling’s manner; and in the MS. are described 
as — 
: Sir John Suckling’s Verses. 
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 Pll love the fairsome (why ? — 
For nothing but to please my eye) ; 
And so the fat and soft-skinned dame 
Ill 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. 
Tl court you all to serve my turn, 
But with such flames as shall not burn; 
Then hang me, Ladies, at your door, 
If eer I doat upon you more. 
A.D. 
WHITE GLOVES AT A MAIDEN ASSIZE. 
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 doubt- 
less to be found in the fact of the hand being, in 
the early Germanic law, asymbol of power. By the 
hand property was delivered over or reclaimed, hand 
joined in hand to strike a bargain and to celebrate 
Referring such of your | 
espousals, &e. That this symbolism should some- 
times 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 re- 
ceiving, 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 haye extended its application. 
Wiuam J. THoms. 
A Lins or 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 Rechtsalther- 
thiimer, 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 
Mized Contemplations, London, 1660, which proves the 
existence of the practice at that 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 : — 
“ Those pardoned men who taste their prince’s loves, 
(As married to new life) do give you gloves.”] 
Mr. Editor, — “ Anciently it was prohibited the 
Judges to wear gloves on the Bench; and at pre- 
sent in the stables of most princes it is not safe 
going in without pulling off the gloves.” —Cham- 
bers’ Cyclopedia, A.D. MDCCXLI. 
Was the presentation of the gloves a sign that 
the Judge was not required to sit upon the Bench 
— their colour significant that there would be no 
oceasion for capital punishment ? Embroidered 
gloves were introduced about the year 1580 into 
England. 
Or were gloves proscribed as the remembrancers 
of the gauntlet cast down as a challenge? “ This 
is the form of a trial by battle; a trial which the 
tenant or defendant in a writ of right has it in his 
election at this day to demand, and which was the 
only decision of such writ of right after the Con- 
quest, till Henry II., by consent of Parliament, 
introduced the Grand Assise, a peculiar species 
of trial. by jury.” — Blackstone, Commeniaries, 
