Master Lee however was a “fellow” who was true to his word. He was piqued at being rejected,—_he_, a gentleman, by a pert knitter of stockings; and he took but a base way of revenging his pique. He had sat knitting his brow in vain, when all at once the thought struck him that he would knit stockings too, and that by a process which should ruin the poor damsel, who, poor as she was, despised an unworthy gentleman and scholar. Thereupon he actually invented and set up the stocking-frame. He first worked at it himself, and then taught his squire-brothers, and his gentle relations; and finally he opened a manufactory at Calverton in Nottinghamshire, and made stockings for the Maiden Queen. All the hand-knitters were in despair, and they left no means untried to bring the new invention into disrepute. Nor did they try in vain, for Will Lee was driven out of England by the force of the coalition against him. He set up his frames at Rouen, and drove a “roaring trade” there, which was however interrupted by the confusion which followed upon the assassination of Henri IV.; and the inventor of the stocking-frame ultimately died at Paris, poorer than the humble knitting-maiden whom he tried to ruin in two ways, and failed in both. And a double moral may be drawn upon this story as neatly as two stockings upon a pair of becoming legs. Swains too lightly given of phrase in honest maidens’ ears may reflect, as they pull on their hose, that treachery, as in the case of Will Lee, brought that gentlemanly knave to want even a foot to the stockings he had made at his own frame. Maidens, on the other hand, may as profitably reflect, when similarly engaged, that they had better knit stockings than lend ear to the wicked words of a fool; and that if once a hole be made in the stocking of their reputation, the most skilful darning will hardly repair, and can never conceal, the permanent injury. And _à propos_ of darning, though it be not at all so to the above story, Shuter was one day reproached by a brother actor that he had a hole in his stocking, and the friend advised inimitable Ned to have it darned. “I will not be such an ass,” exclaimed the original Sir Anthony Absolute; “a hole in the stocking is an accident that may happen to any gentleman, but a darn is premeditated poverty.” King James I. was willing to do what would have shocked even Shuter,—namely, wear borrowed stockings. There is a letter extant in which that monarch asks a noble to lend him the “scarlet hose with the gold clocks,” on a particular day on which he was desirous of giving the French Ambassador “an extraordinary idea of his magnificence!”