rchbishop of Benevento, says that people can kiss each other from head
to foot. He pities the people with big noses who can only approach each
other with difficulty; and he counsels ladies with long noses to have
flat-nosed lovers.

The kiss was a very ordinary form of salutation throughout ancient
times. Plutarch recalls that the conspirators, before killing Caesar,
kissed his face, hand and breast. Tacitus says that when Agricola, his
father-in-law, returned from Rome, Domitian received him with a cold
kiss, said nothing to him, and left him confounded in the crowd. The
inferior who could not succeed in greeting his superior by kissing him,
put his mouth to his own hand, and sent him a kiss that the other
returned in the same way if he so wished.

This sign was used even for worshipping the gods. Job, in his parable
(Chap. xxxi.), which is perhaps the oldest of known books, says that he
has not worshipped the sun and the moon like the other Arabs, that he
has not carried his hand to his mouth as he looked at the stars.

In our Occident nothing remains of this ancient custom but the puerile
and genteel civility that is still taught to children in some small
towns, of kissing their right hands when someone has given them some
sweets.

It was a horrible thing to betray with a kiss; it was that that made
Caesar's assassination still more hateful. We know all about Judas'
kisses; they have become proverbial.

Joab, one of David's captains, being very jealous of Amasa, another
captain, says to him (2 Sam. xx. 9): "Art thou in health, my brother?
And he took Amasa by the beard with the right hand to kiss him," and
with his other hand drew his sword and "smote him therewith in the fifth
rib, and shed out his bowels on the ground."

No other kiss is to be found in the other fairly frequent assassinations
which were committed among the Jews, unless it be perhaps the kisses
which Judith gave to the captain Holophernes, before cutting off his
head while he was in bed asleep; but no mention is made of them, and the
thing is merely probable.

In one of Shakespeare's tragedies called "Othello," this Othello, who is
a black, gives two kisses to his wife before strangling her. That seems
abominable to honourable people; but Shakespeare's partisans say it is
beautifully natural, particularly in a black.

When Giovanni Galeas Sforza was assassinated in Milan Cathedral, on St.
Stephen's day, the two Medici in the Reparata church