Page:The Ancestor Number 1.djvu/97

 THE ANCESTOR 57 simple and vigorous results. To deny this is to confess either to an ignorance of the practice of heraldry or to a mind barren of original effort. Criticism such as this may be easily met. The simplifying and making reasonable of English heraldry has a more serious enemy in the path. The antiquary who is content to live and learn, the architect and the artist will welcome a new move- ment towards sanity and comprehension, but there remains the personage whom Mr. St. John Hope has christened for more distinction * the Antiquarian,* That the past century has scantly left one stone upon another of dead antiquarian creeds affects him not a whit. He declares himself in this as in like matters ' in favour of established formula.' In the old days he said this as doggedly when innovators robbed Captain Clutterbuck of the established formula that a round arch was a Saxon arch and a pointed one a Norman. The private expression of some of the opinions of this present essay brought against the writer an antiquarian with furious quill, who maintained in black print that not only was the whole system of the handbooks an ark to be kept secure from enquiring hand, but as the antiquarian's favourite handbook shortened gules into gu, and azure into az, even so the abbreviations themselves became inspired, and the amplifying them back into gules and azure was ' ugly and ridiculous ' as well as wicked. How the chopped fragments were to be pronounced by the pious was left uncertain. Archaeology is perhaps the only science in which such con- troversy as this would be possible in serious newspapers or reviews, and towards the unhappy subject of armory the duller minds amongst archaeologists inevitably tend. No other subject, perhaps, offers at the cost of an uncritical browsing along a shelf of books the opportunity for a barndoor-fowl's flight into scientific literature. A dozen handbooks are probably a-making to-day, and the familiar tags will appear with new surnames on their bindings. But the day is certainly at hand when the committal to paper of long and misunderstood lists of words will fail to equip the antiquarian for an honoured place on the bookshelves. Dryasdust has been unhorsed, and we shall see whether Master Mumblazon, the least of his squires, has a surer seat. OSWALD BARRON.