is termed in their language); "he has a right to take them by the arm and
to kiss them, which is the custom of the country; and if any one does not
do so, it is regarded and imputed as ignorance and ill-breeding on his
part." Even the grave Erasmus, when he visited England, fell easily into
this pretty practice, and wrote with untheological fervor of the "girls
with angel faces," who were "so kind and obliging." "Wherever you come,"
he says, "you are received with a kiss by all; when you take your leave
you are dismissed with kisses; you return, kisses are repeated. They come
to visit you, kisses again; they leave you, you kiss them all round.
Should they meet you anywhere, kisses in abundance in fine, wherever you
move there is nothing but kisses"--a custom, says this reformer, who has
not the fear of Stubbes before his eyes, "never to be sufficiently
commended."

We shall find no more convenient opportunity to end this part of the
social study of the age of Shakespeare than with this naive picture of
the sex which most adorned it. Some of the details appear trivial; but
grave history which concerns itself only with the actions of conspicuous
persons, with the manoeuvres of armies, the schemes of politics, the
battles of theologies, fails signally to give us the real life of the
people by which we judge the character of an age.




III

When we turn from France to England in, the latter part of the sixteenth
and the beginning of the seventeenth century, we are in another
atmosphere; we encounter a literature that smacks of the soil, that is as