Page:The Ancestor Number 1.djvu/91

 THE ANCESTOR 51 Woodward and Burnet, Burnet is found differing from Wood- ward on the grave point of the distinction between flory and flurty^ and Burnett dead. Woodward points his case in notes to a new edition of their book. For an example of the second custom of constructing separate words for artistic variants of the same form-the cross paty is a case in point. The unvary- ing use of the middle ages points us to a certain type of cross — as found in the arms of Latimer — for a cross paty. But not one of our modern armorists is content with this description. The three centuries of the heraldic age he tacitly sets down as mistaken. Paty as an epithet he applies only to that variety of flat-ended cross which the man in the street calls Maltese, and which, although very early armory might sometimes place it amongst crosses paty, the later middle ages found an adjec- tive for in the word formy. The true cross paty, when encountered by the armorist in its plump shape (fashion of 1300), is ticketted cross patoncee ; but when the fashion of 1450 thins its arms it straightway becomes a cross flory. For those who affect to regard heraldry as an unreformable science because of the wide acceptance of an iron tradition which makes the last development of its rules as fixed as the definitions of Euclid, we may recommend the comparison of the last half- dozen handbooks of heraldry, of which no two agree in their efforts to reconcile the old crosses with their modern tickets. The antiquary will concern him very little with this tangle of crosses. ' You bring me so many crosses that I am in a manner weary of them,' he will say, as even a character in one of the heraldic dialogues is made to say in a curiously con- vincing phrase. With ancient examples before him he will recognize some half-dozen crosses in frequent use, with two or three more variants of rare occurrence. Elvin's and Edmondson's lists will trouble him not at all, and unless for enlargement of the understanding he will never win to a know- ledge of shy varieties such as the cross nowy-degraded-conjoined. In one of those interminable lists a certain cross is found whose expressive name may answer for the most of its fellows. Therefore we draw it from obscurity. It is the cross anserated or cross issuing out of gooses heads ! And now to speak of the beasts and fowls and other living things to whose shapes the art of armory owes its most fan- tastic beauty. For their conduct in their shield prison the armorist has exhausted ingenuity in the devising of rules upon