Page:Angelo's Pic Nic.djvu/17

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THE ANGELO FAMILY※ MANY are the stories told of the families of the enmigrés who flocked into England from France and Italy in the latter half of the eighteenth century, but few exceed in interest that of the Angelo family. They were Italians. Their surname, however, was not Angelo, but Tremamondo. It is a name suggestive of long descent and the deadly shock of volcanic forces; it means a tremor of the world; it implies some sort of universal earthquake. And their motto and armorial bearings, whether theirs by long inheritance, or theirs by the invention of some modern genealogist, carry out the same idea, being quite in the manner of the canting heraldry of old times. In direct allusion to the name Tremamondo the shield is azure with a thunderbolt striking a mountain, and the motto, ingeniously adapted from a verse in the Psalms, is Tremat vould probably be found to be the name of a more than ordinarily uneasy locality in the volcanic province of Naples, from which the family originally came, and the earliest form of the personal name was doubtless not “Tremamondo" but "di Trem amondo;" yet whatever their antiquity, whatever their origin in the long-vanished past -whether or not, as alleged by them, descended from one of the Pagani, followers of Tancred in the Holy Wars-in the more For the whole of the evidences for the statements made in this Introduction, excepting statements now made for the first time, the reader is referred to my History of the Angelo Family, published in The Ancestor (Vol. viii, pp. 1-72) ix