THE WEDDING DAY.* Tins is apparently Mr. Wood's third compilation,
and to judge from the way in which this book is put together, we should uot be surprised if it were to prove one of the links in an interminable chain. Neither special aptitude nor special study is required for a work of the kind. Any regular frequenter of the British Museum could turn out page after page as the result of unswerving diligence and omnivorous reading. Nor does it much matter what is the subject. To-day it is the wedding day ; last week it was "Giants and Dwarfs ;" the week before, "Curiosities of Clocks and Watches." There can be no limit to the comparison of the various customs which prevail in all nations and have prevailed in all ages. When dress, food, the art of government, the art of medicine, sports and pastimes, education, babies, law, gardening, travelling, furniture, funerals, are all exhausted, Mr. Wood will probably be found comparing the mode of cutting corns adopted by the ancient Greeks and the Polynesians with that practised in Louden and Paris. We have no doubt he will have plenty to say on that subject. Then, as now, his volumes will be sure to contain much curious matter, an abundance of anecdote, remarks that must prove suggestive to the dullest minds, and details which will make the fortune of the country newspapers. Whether corns are solely the product of tight shoes, or the elements of corns were implanted in human feet at the Fall ; how corns were got rid of in the Stone age, what remains of corn-cutters' implements are found in the Lake villages of Switzerland and the Tyrol, whether the Red Indians remove scalps and corns indifferently with the same weapon, will serve as questions for debate in farmhouses, and supply any vacuum in the column for miscellanea.
In other respects Mr. Wood will probably be the same as ever.
His subject will have changed, but that will be all. The want of method which strikes us most painfully in this book can hardly be cured without a total revolution. As long as Mr. Wood is content simply to pass in review the marriage customs of the Jews, the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Chinese, the Africans, the Turks, the Russians, the Germans, and the English, any kind of system is out of the question. The only attempt at a coherent arrangement is to be found in the index, and so far as literary workman ship is concerned, the index-maker has done more than the author. Mr. Wood scarcely once vouchsafes to point out either a resem blance or a contrast. A notable example of this occurs in regard to the nuptial bath. Among the Jews, the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Persians, the Chinese, the Turks, and the Swedes, there was a custom for the bride to be taken to a bath a day or so before the wedding. The index enables us to collect all these instances, but Mr. Wood chronicles each custom in turn, and only once refers to such a coincidence. Again, we are told that in Brittany young girls visited the bridal chamber, and "secured the pins which had been used in fastening the bride's dress, as a charm to bring them husbands." Among our ancestors, on the other hand, the bridesmaids, when they undressed the bride, had to throw away and lose all the pins with which her dress was fastened, and if any bridesmaid kept one of these pins she would not be married for another year. Here Mr. Wood has not pointed the contrast, yet in this also we find that his index is more faithful. The various traditions attaching to shoes, whether as symbols of domestic obedience or of luck, are scattered in the same way over the volumes. A few are collected at the beginning, but the best story of all is reserved for the end. In the early part of the book we are told of the Jewish custom of loosing the shoe as a sign of giving up all dominion over a woman, Among the early Christians, a lady's refusal was couched in the phrase that she would not take off her shoes to such a man. A bridegroom after giving his bride a ring presented her with a shoe. Luther, being present at a wedding, put the husband's shoe upon the head of the bed, to show who should be lord of the houae. In Russia, the husband's first command to his wife was to pull off his boots, and if she pulled off the wrong one first, she received a stroke from a whip that was hidden in it. Stories such as these bring us to the English custom of throwing an old shoe for luck, and we are then thrown ourselves over more than four hundred pages to the following instance :—
" A correspondent of Notes and Qteries, in 1868, says, 'At a bridal at which I once assisted in Leicestershire, whore the subsequent festivities lasted nearly a week, the lucky missile was an old hob-nailed boot, cast away by some tramp, and found in the road by one of the bride's brothers. It was said that the young lady who could retrieve it would be married next, and the brother threw it clear over the carriage into a large clump of rhododendrons on the lawn, and into this the bridemaids plunged, in all their bridll gear, and then ono emerged, holding the trophy in triumph above her head. The boot was afterwards suspended by a white satin ribbon from a beam in the hail.'"
The same treatment is observed as to marriage settlements. They did not come into use, we are told till the first Babylonian period, which of course explains their intimate connection with the Captivity. It is not till much more modern times, and a very distant part of Mr. Wood's book, that we hear of the most gigantic of all marriage settlements, consisting of five hundred sheets of vellum. Making yet another dip some where between these two places, we read of the Persian practice of bestowing a jointure on the bride, and we have a valuable hint for future English marriages. A contract was drawn up before the wedding, and the bridegroom promised to settle a sum of money or other presents upon his bride. If in the sanguineness of hope, or in the heat of contention, he promised too much, there
was a simple remedy. The bride was escorted to his house on the evening of the wedding-day, and when once she had left her
father's house, it was esteemed the greatest possible disgrace for her to return to it. All that the bridegroom had to do, was to "shut his door upon the bride's cavalcade, and to declare that he would not take her unless the jointure was reduced. A negotia tion took place between the parties, and the matter was finally adjusted according to his wishes, to save the scandal of taking back the maiden." Such an incident may be amusing in itself, but we should appreciate it all the more if it came in its order. The discussion about wedding rings owes much of its interest to the fact that we have not to hunt all over the two volumes for its details, and if Mr. 1Vood had written more in the style of the following extract, he might have escaped our censure :—
" Although a ring is absolutely necessary in a Church of England marriage, it may be of any metal, and of any size. Some years sinoe a ring of brass was used at Worcester at a wedding before the registrar, who was threatened with proceedings for not compelling a gold one to be employed. A story is told of the wedding of two paupers, who came to the church and requested to be married with the church key, as the parochial authorities bad not furnished them with a ring. The clerk, feeling some delicacy about using the key, fetched an old curtain ring from his own house, and with that article the marriage was celebrated. The church key was used in lieu of a wedding ring at a church near Colchester early in the present century ; and that was not a solitary instance within the past one hundred years in this country. Tho Duke cf Hamilton was married at May Fair with a bed-curtain ring. Notes and Queries for October, 1860, relates that a ring of leather, cut transversely from a finger of the bridegroom's glove, was used as a substitute for the wedding ring on one occasion. A clergyman unjustifiably stopped a wedding in India because the bridegroom offered a diamond ring instead of one generally in use. In Ireland the uso of a gold ring is superstitiously required."
Mr. Wood's only valid excuse for the absence of all arrangement would be that the mass of his materials defied anything like system. Under what head, he might fairly ask, could he classify such details as the penalty imposed upon bachelors in Greece, and
the wife tax levied upon them in Rome ; marriages under the gallows, and marriages in a chemise ; the Scythian refusal of a wife who had not killed an enemy, and the Rhodian custom of sending for a bride by the public crier ; the quince which, according to Solon's laws, was to be eaten by the bride and bridegroom on their entering the nuptial chamber, and the security which a Caith ness man had to give if he could not say the Shorter Catechism that he would learn it within six months from his marriage? We may
admit this plea to some extent, though it is not what lawyers would call a plea in bar. It is clear that Mr. Wood might have found it difficult to digest his multifarious collections, and that even when he had digested them his book would not have attained such a rank as to reward his labour. Perhaps, too, he might have been driven to omit some of his most characteristic details by despairing of an appropriate framework. The story of the violent courtship of Australian brides by a stunning blow from a lover's club, or by a lover holding one spear at their throats while he twisted another in their long hair, would, of course, throw a light on the many
instances given us of affected flight and capture, of affected force and resistance. So, too, the Turkish custom of dyeing a bride's hair red would be significant of a practice which prevailed a short time ago among those who wished for proposals, though as the Turks also dyed the bride's heels, the analogy is not complete.
Yet there are many other customs chronicled by Mr. IVood which are almost wholly isolated, and which, notable as they are, cannot possibly be connected. So far as they are concerned, we must allow that his excuse is a good one, and it is hard if this excuse does not cover a large proportion of his materials. To be complete, however, it would have to cover the whole of his book, and even then it might be met by the remark that if the book could not be written properly, it need not have been written.
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