In days gone by, too, it appears to have been customary for both sexes to wear small looking-glasses--a fantastic fashion much ridiculed by Ben Jonson and others of his time. Men even wore them in their hats--an allusion to which custom we find in Ben Jonson's _Cynthia's Revels_ (Act ii., sc. 1): "Where is your page? Call for your casting-bottle, and place your mirror in your hat as I told you." We may infer that this was the very height of affectation by the manner in which the remark is introduced. While men of fashion wore mirrors as brooches or ornaments in their hats, ladies carried them at their girdles or on their breasts. Thus Lovelace makes a lady say:--
"My lively shade thou ever shalt retaine In thy inclosed feather-framed glasse."
It was a popular superstition in former years that fine glass, such as that of Venice, would break if poison were put into it. To this curious notion Massinger thus gracefully alludes:--
"Here crystal glasses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . This pure metal So innocent is, and faithful to the mistress, Or master, that possesses it, that rather Than hold one drop that's venomous, of itself It flies in pieces, and deludes the traitor."
This is among the errors noticed by Sir Thomas Browne, who says, "And although it be said that poison will break a Venice glass, yet have we not met with any of that nature. Were there a truth herein, it were the best preservative for princes and persons exalted to such fears, and surely far better than divers now in use." It may not be inappropriate here to refer to the well-known tradition connected with the "Luck of Edenhall." From time immemorial there has been a current belief that any one who had the courage to rush upon a fairy festival and snatch from the merry throng their drinking-glass, would find it prove to him a constant source of good fortune, supposing he could carry it across a running stream. A glass has been carefully preserved at Edenhall, Cumberland, which was in all probability a sacred chalice; but the legend is that the butler, one day going to draw water, surprised a company of fairies who were amusing themselves on the grass near the well. He seized the glass that was standing upon its margin, which the fairies tried to recover, but, after an ineffectual struggle, they vanished, crying:--