Have we not still to consider the stuffed fencing Glove, with the short shield of red leather, and the giant Glove which swells the fist of the boxers?--the ordinance Glove of the good Dumanet; that white cotton Glove which the brave trooper puts on so willingly on Sunday, coming out of barracks like a conquering hero? Is there not besides the Glove of the Cuirassier, with its large shield of buckskin, which this last man of iron places so gallantly on his hip when he is on express service? The history of Gauntlets and of military Gloves from the time of the Middle Ages would make a mighty volume, like the ladies' Glove and the work-people's Mitten. The liturgical Glove, yet more important, is of three kinds: the /pontifical Glove/, which was worn by bishops and abbés; the Glove which simple priests had adopted for particular occasions; and lastly, the /prelatic/ /Glove/. On /pontifical Gloves/ alone Monseigneur X. Barbier de Montault has found means to write in the /Bulletin Monumental/, 1876-1877, nearly two hundred pages of closely packed text, in 8vo: /Ab uno disce omnes/. See, my amiable friend, I repeat it--see in what an inextricable archæological labyrinth I might have set you to wander, /à propos/ of all these dear little Gloves, of which I had promised you a history, but about which it appears to me I am making only a lively chatter of whipped Glove. I should not have set on the table aught beyond that which lends grace to woman: Gloves on a champagne glass or in a shepherdess's hat, roses and a love-letter half opened; such simple still life had assuredly better inspired my Muse than all the documents brought together and packed one on another, well calculated to frighten a mind which is by no means pleased with such barricades of notes and annotations. Ah, my fair friend, how right was Balzac, in his brilliant and profound /Traité de la vie élégante/, when he wrote the following lines, which I had not sufficiently considered before pledging my word in your society! "The learned man, or the elegant man of the world, who would search out in every epoch the costumes of a people, would compile the most interesting history and the most rationally true. . . . . To ask the origin of shoes, of alms-purses, of hoods, of the cockade, of hoop-petticoats, of farthingales, of /Gloves/, of masks, is to drag a /modilogist/ into the frightful maze of sumptuary laws, and upon all the battlefields, where civilisation has triumphed over the gross manners imported into Europe by the barbarism of the Middle Ages.