One of the most dramatic episodes of its kind—when a glove under romantic circumstances was taken as the very embodiment of royal authority—is related in some papers of D’Israeli. Young Conraddin, the last of the Hohenstaufer male line, having fallen into the hands of Mainfroy, who had usurped the crown in 1282, was brought up for execution. On the scaffold the young prince raised his voice in lamentation and declared his right to the succession. In proof of this he cast his glove among the assembled crowd, beseeching that it might be carried to his kinsmen who would avenge his death. It was taken up by a knight and brought to Peter, King of Aragon, who, _in virtue of the same glove_, was afterwards crowned at Palermo. The kings of France on the point of death religiously gave their gloves to their sons as a token that they were to be invested with the kingdom. That such should have been almost their last thought and act shows how real to them was the power symbolically invested in the glove. Gloves, royalty, feudalism—these three are inseparable in history. The granting of lands by the king was the root of the feudal system, in which modern society had its rise, and the lein of the monarch over all lands was the first doctrine of Divine Right. Thus, the glove, by which tenure was given, became also the pledge of the service by virtue of which tenure was held; and on the hand of him who could both bestow the one and demand the other, it was indeed a symbol of supreme authority. In the attire of English monarchs, gloves were especially conspicuous under the Norman and the Plantagenet dynasties when the feudal system was yet young. One would infer that as the emblematical embodiment of the new order, kings found them indispensable to their dignity. Kings were even buried with gloves on their hands, when “arrayed in ghostly state, they were gathered to their fathers.” Richard I. and John in their tombs wear richly jeweled gloves. It is said that Richard’s are the identical ones by which he was recognized in Austria on his return from the Crusades. In Canterbury Cathedral the gloves of Edward, the Black Prince, are hung above his last resting place. The Bench inherited gloves direct from the Church. On the judge’s hands they symbolized incorruptibility, uprightness. In England a maiden assize—that is, a county session in which no malefactor is put to death—is commemorated by a gift of white gloves, even to-day. White gloves here typify a clean record, an absence of felony in the judge’s precinct. “They represent the zero of crime,” says Beck, “the antithesis of the black cap. They afford a foretaste of the millennium. The occasion of their presentation is held to reflect credit on any town or neighborhood, and is widely noticed in the newspapers.” The recorder of Cambridge was the happy recipient of this honor, we are told, three times in succession.