THE GESTURE-LANGUAGE. 49' 



wliicli shows that in the middle ages visitors were expected to 

 leave their weapons with the porter at the outer gate, and when 

 they came to the hall door to take off hoods and gloves. 



" When thou come tho liall dor to, 

 Do of thy hode, thy gloves also.''^ 



That women are not required to uncover their heads in church 

 or on a visit, is quite consistent with such an origin of the 

 custom, as their head-dresses were not armour; and the same 

 consistency may be observed in the practice of ladies keeping 

 the glove on in shaking hands, while men very commonly re- 

 move it. When a knight^s glove was a steel gauntlet, such a 

 distinction would be reasonable enough. 



This may indeed be fanciful. The practice of women having 

 the head covered in church belongs to the earliest period of 

 Christianity, and the reasons for adopting it were clearly speci- 

 fied. And the usage of men praying with the head uncovered, 

 may have been an intentional reversal of the practice of cover- 

 ing the head in offering sacrifice among the Eomans, and by 

 the Jews in their prayers then and now. It does not seem to 

 have been universal, and is even now not followed in the Cop- 

 tic and Abyssinian churches, in which the Semitic custom of 

 uncovering not the head but the feet is still kept up. This 

 latter ceremony is of high antiquity, and may be plausibly ex- 

 plained as having been done at first merely for cleanliness, as 

 it is now among the Moslems in their baths and houses, as 

 well as in theii' mosques, that the ground may not be defiled. 



There are, moreover, a number of practices found in different 

 parts of the world, which thi'ow doubt on these off-hand ex- 

 planations of the customs of uncovering the head and feet, and 

 would almost lead us to include both, as particular cases of a 

 general class of reverential uncoverings of the body. Saul 

 strips off his clothes to prophesy, and lies down so all that day 

 and night.^ TertuUian speaks against the practice of pray- 

 ing with cloaks laid aside, as the heathen do.^ There was a 

 well-known custom in Tahiti, of uncovering the body down to 

 the waist in honour of gods or chiefs, and even in the neigh- 



' Wright, ' History of Domestic Manners,' etc. ; Loudon, 1862, p. 141. 

 2 I Sam. xix. 24. s rpert., De Oratlone, xii. 



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