o,
Who, like ourselves, have made the Boot and Shoe!"

The story as told in these verses is not exactly the same as the one
current among the makers of the boot and shoe in our own island, an account
in an old book called _The History of the Gentle Craft_ (the production, no
doubt, of the well-known Thomas Delony) being the basis of the tradition as
received now by the British shoemaker. In the _Golden Legende_, one of the
earliest of our printed books, and in Alban Butler's _Lives of the Saints_,
as compiled from the Roman Martyrologies, as also in the inscriptions of
some pieces of ancient tapestry formerly belonging to the shoemakers'
chapel in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, Paris, but, when I saw them, in one
of the galleries of the Louvre, is the like version as the one here given.
The authority, too, of the Church Calendar of England, even as it still
remains after the loppings of the Reformation, is another corroboration
that CRISPIN and CRISPIANUS, brothers, were early martyrs to the Christian
faith, and through that chiefly honoured, and not because the one became a
redoubted general and the other a successful suitor to the daughter of some
all-potent emperor. In the Delony version--itself, in every probability, a
borrowing from the popular mind of the Elizabethan period,--these things
are put forth; while in trade paintings and songs the Prince CRISPIN is
assumed to have a wife or sister, one can hardly tell which, in the person
of a princess, the Princess CRISPIANUS, and who figures as the patron of
the women's branch of the shoemakers' art; CRISPIN himself presiding over
the coarser labour for the rougher sex. This artifice, if not purely
historical, is at least very excusable, because so natural, seeing that the
duplex principle has such an extensive range; that even the feet themselves
come into the world in pairs, and so shoes must be produced after the same
fashion--paired, as the shoemakers have done by their adored CRISPIN and
CRISPIANUS.

It has now but to be stated that the writer of the foregoing lines (a long
time now the common property of his fellow-workmen) and this present
paragraph, has for many years contemplated the production of something,
which might assume even the size of a book, in connexion with the various
curious particulars which may be affiliated with this Crispin story, and
therefore would be glad to find some of the numerous erudite renders of "N.
& Q." helping his inquiries eith