OSCULATORY ENGLAND IT WAS RUDE NOT TO KISS.

Evening Post, Volume LXXXIV, Issue 72, 21 September 1912, Page 10

OSCULATORY ENGLAND IT WAS RUDE NOT TO KISS.

Though France is the kissing nation now, <t seems that England used to have that .distinction. In 1466 a Bohemian nobleman named Leo yon Rozmital visited" England, and in the "Journal of His Travel," published 1577, he noted: "It is the custom there that on the arrival of a distinguished stranger from foreign parts the hostesß with all her family go out to meet him, and the guests are required to kiss them all ; and this among the English was tho same as shaking hands among other nations." , The learned and sedate Erasmus, in 1499^ wrote a Latin letter from England to his friend Fausto Anfrelmi advising him to come to England at once, for, he remarks, " here are girls with angels' faces who will receive you with kißßes. They come to visit you, kisses again. Should they meet you anywhere, kisßes m abundance; in fine, wherever you move, there is nothing but kisses." At the time of the Restoration, which was a gay age, England kissed to such an extent that the foreign visitor was bewildered by its prevalence. Nieholaus de Bethlen, who travelled in England in 1663, writes that "my brother and I behaved very rudely on one occasion, being unaware that it was customary in that country to kiss the corner of the month of ladies, instead of shaking hands, as we do in Hungary. "We were ihvited to dine at the house of a gentleman of high rank, and found his wife and three daughters (one of them married) ready to receive us. We kissed the girls, but not the married adies, and, thereby, greatly offended the latter. Duval apologised for our blunder and told us that when saluting we must always kiss the senior lady first and leave the girls to the last."