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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 consequenée of the ex- 
tremely low price of stockings in the present day, 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 VIIL., 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 Rider, 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 * 
