Page:The Ancestor Number 1.djvu/85

 THE ANCESTOR 45 use amongst the great folk and the lawyers. Something might be said for keeping blazon in this tongue, but the objections rise up at once. The French in which these blazons were written is a dead language on both sides the channel, and its literature is, to all but a few, a dead literature. The French of Froissart has been woefully academized, and if we blazoned in the new tongue we should be seeking new words for old ones with indifferent success. And moreover the most part of the English bring from the schoolroom but little French speech that will serve them outside the doors of a restaurant. We know too that the French blazon in French, the Italians blazon in Italian, the Spaniards in Spanish, and the Germans, although they have fallen into the modern error of over-description of details, yet describe arms in unmingled German. Few people, however, are aware of the strong precedent which exists for the blazoning of English arms after a more English fashion than that which obtains to-day. From the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries we have wealth of examples to show that those who blazoned arms in French could also blazon them in stark, straightforward English. For the mass of words in dog- latinized English and misspelt and misunderstood French which clot in the pages of the heraldry books there is neither early authority nor present need, being, as they are, nothing but the maggots of the armorists. There is no excuse for our use of adjectives in French of Stratford atte Bo we under a mysterious rule which decrees that those ending in -ant should keep the masculine form, whilst those ending in -e keep as invariably the feminine. The new broom may surely swish about most of these epithets. There is no reasonable excuse for an English herald's description of the smoking chimney as fumant^ the bloody hand as emhrued with some one else's blood or as dis- tilling its own. A bent bow explains itself without need of the word flexed. She whose golden hair is hanging down her back need not be labelled crined or, and it were better to call a round object round rather than arrondie. When we meet a man walking in our shield Mr. Boutell offers us the alterna- tive of describing him as ambulant or gradiant, neither of which words seems to throw any new light on the attitude. In a vast number of cases the real meaning of these words has been obscured by the practise of ignorant heralds. Thus a bar with its ends cut off is said to be humettee. But humettee, if it have