Page:The Ancestor Number 1.djvu/92

 52 THE ANCESTOR rules. No paw is lifted without a word-shackle snapped upon it. Yet with a few words on the conventional positions of the lion, the beast most often found upon the shield, whose very antiquity as the earliest of charges has caused conventions to arise round about him, the natural history book of the heralds may be left to the philologist, to whom a strange word is a truffle to be joyfully rooted up. The lion on the shield is the whelp of convention — a monster like his bastard kinsman the griffon. No attempt is ever made to paint this royal beast in colours which hint at the colour of a mortal hide. Like the eagle he is at ease in blue, gold or checkers. His natural position is held to be when he stands ramping at the world, claws to the fore and lashing with his tail. Therefore the lion rampant in old blazon as in modern French may be ' a lion ' needing no further epithet until he drops to his paws and becomes passant. It will be found that we follow the habit of the ages of heraldry and save ourselves needless words if we recognize that the lion looking sidelong towards the spectator may be styled a leopard. Even the modern armorists recognize this when they come to describe the lion^s face used as a charge by itself, in which case it has always been blazoned as a leopard's head. Now as the custom- ary position of the leopard is passant so the word leopard used alone serves for what the handbooks would describe as a lion passant gardant. A ramping lion with the full face seen, as in the arms of Brocas, was emblazoned as a leopard rampant. Early heraldry knows nothing of lions reguardant as the modern word is, signifying looking backwards with turned heads. A sole exception may be the well known Welsh coat of three skulking lions with tails between their legs. But if it be needful to describe such a lion in modern heraldry it may be as well to note that regardant and gardant are in effect the same word, having the same meaning, and were used indif- ferently in old blazons — the splitting of them into two mean- ings being a piece of the usual heraldic illiteracy. A lion looking backward is better English and better sense than the lion rampant regardant of the dictionaries. Let us say again that for the blazoning of beasts and the like some knowledge of the customary conventions of armorial art is very needful if we would save ourselves a mouthful of foolish words. Keeping before us the flat-iron shaped shield- form we shall see that three ramping lions are commoilly set