MANUFACTURE OF STOCKINGS. 417 



text that the working class would suffer. France showed 

 herself equally short-sighted : William Lea found no en- 

 couragement there, and he was reduced to die in a hos- 

 pital ; like so many other men of genius, who have had 

 the misfortune of being too much a-head of their age ! 



Besides this, we should be very much mistaken if we 

 supposed the body of knitters very numerous, to whom 

 William Lea fell a victim. In 1583, it was only people 

 of high rank and fortune who wore stockings. The 

 middle class substituted for this portion of modern dress 

 narrow stripes of variously coloured cloths. The rest of 

 the population (nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a 

 thousand) walked bare-legged. In consequence of the ex- 

 tremely low price of stockings in the present clay, there 

 is not above one man in a thousand who cannot afford to 

 buy them. Hence an immense number of workmen, in 

 every part of the world, is now employed in this branch 

 of manufacture.* 



If it be deemed necessary I will add, that at Stock- 

 port, the substitution of steam power for manual labour 

 in weaving looms, has not prevented the workmen from 

 increasing by one third in a few years. 



We must now deprive our adversaries of their last re- 



* This is certainly an epochal point of great interest in domestic 

 manufacture. The bandaged stocking is of a very remote date, and is 

 found in all the Saxon figures of our missals and monuments ; it was 

 in common use among the peasantry of Europe even during the fif- 

 teenth century. Henry \ T I1I., it appears, wore silk stockings, and 

 Queen Elizabeth refused to wear any others, whence they came into 

 vogue. These seem to have been brought from abroad; but in 1564, 

 William Eider, an apprentice on London Bridge, borrowed a pair of 

 knit worsted stockings from Mantua, took the hint, and made a pair 

 exactly like them, which he presented to the Earl of Pembroke. And 

 these are the first pair of worsted stockings known to be knit in Eng- 

 land : the prototype of millions upon millions. Translator. 



18 * 



