Kissing the foot, or the toe, has been required by the popes as a sign of respect since the eighth century. The first to receive the honor was Constantine. It was paid to him by the Emperor Justinian II. on his entry into Constantinople 710. About 827 Valentine I. required every one to kiss his foot, and from that time this mark of reverence has been expected. The Pope wears a slipper with a cross, which is kissed. In recent times Protestants have not been required to perform the ceremony, but to bend the knee slightly. When the excommunicated German emperor, Henry IV., had been humbled by three days of penance, barefoot, and fasting, in the month of January, before the palace of Pope Gregory VII., he was admitted to “the superlative honor” of kissing the pontiff’s toe. Kissing the feet of princes was a token of subjection which was sometimes carried so far that the print of the foot received the kiss, so as to give the impression that the very dust had become sacred by the royal tread, or that the subject was not worthy to salute even the prince’s foot, but was content to kiss the earth itself near, or on which he trod. The Bible says: “And kings shall be thy nursing fathers, and their queens thy nursing mothers; they shall bow down to thee with their face toward the earth, and lick up the dust of thy feet, and thou shalt know that I am the Lord, for they shall not be ashamed that wait for me.”—(Isaiah xlix. 23.) “They shall lick the dust like a serpent, they shall move out of their holes like worms of the earth; they shall be afraid of the Lord our God and shall fear because of thee.”—(Micah, vii. 17.) Kisses have been the reward of genius, as when Voltaire was publicly kissed in the stage-box by the young and lovely Duchess de Villars, who was ordered by an enthusiastic pit thus to reward the author of “Merope.” In politics they have been used as bribes, as in the famous Eatanswill elections of the “Pickwick Papers,” and also in a still more famous election. For, when Fox was contesting the hard-won seat at Westminster, the beautiful Duchess of Devonshire offered to kiss all who voted for the great statesman. And fully as famous, and perhaps in a better cause, was the self-denying patriotism of the beautiful Lady Gordon, who, when the ranks of the Scottish regiments had been sadly thinned by cruel Badajoz and Salamanca, turned recruiting sergeant, and, to tempt the gallant lads, placed the recruiting shilling in her lips, from whence who would might take it with his own. In England, during the last century, a certain candidate for a Norfolk borough kissed the voters’ wives with guineas in his mouth, for which he was expelled the House. Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, gave Steel, the butcher, a kiss for his vote nearly a century since.