Page:The Ancestor Number 1.djvu/77

 THE ANCESTOR 37 that a working knowledge of it is needful for each and all of these workers, although with none of their grave studies can the science of heraldry presume to rank. For the art of heraldry is a wide field — as wide as a great decorative art may be ; but when the science of heraldry has suffered the unwinding of its gilded mummy clothes, one must acknowledge, calling to mind the extravagant claims of those who swaddled it, that, like Sarah's baby, it is 'a very little one/ Let us consider the outset difficulty of the antiquary to whom the occasion comes for a prentice knowledge of heraldry. When an architect or topographer is before a shield in stone or glass or laton, or when the genealogist is considering the shields of descents and alliances, how shall he describe them } To those loaded bookshelves he comes for guidance. On the lower shelves are the ancient folios. These indeed are well-springs of limpid and engaging nonsense, but the mind capable of absorbing the systems of blazonry formulated by Randle Holme and his fellows is only found to-day amongst graduates of Peking. And from the works of these fathers there is no appeal to the little treatises of our own days, for they are but the fathers in miniature, duller it may be, and with the fathers' flamboyant English pruned away. Little or no critical advance has been made since the time when seven- teenth century pens squeaked through reams of disquisition concerning things which the passing of but two or three cen- turies had made as remote as the economies of Tibet. It seems that before our antiquary may describe his shield he must sit down to a full meal of folly. Yet if we take in hand the ancient rolls of arms, and under their guidance approach the contemporary seals and painting of arms, we are at once in clearer air. For the blazon of arms is no hidden thing to be learned with a great toil ill-spent. What is it but the short and meet description of the manner in which the cunning artists of the past planned that certain simple devices might be painted upon shields in such fashion that although men arrayed ten or twenty thousand such shields each should have its distinct bearing ? The student finds him- self asking what has happened that a shield which its bearer in the former days might blazon in a dozen reasonable words now demands a mouthful of strange phrases in a long sentence framed in the fear of fifty rules and precedents.