be coaxed into remaining with us, to use a phrase dear to the Bou tells and the Cussanses, as 'a living science.' The courage of their opinions however never takes these writers to the logical conclusion of exchanging the helms which support their crests for the tall silk hats, their legitimate successors, mantled with the antimacassars of Mr. Boutell's day, although this would have grown reasonably enough out of their suggestions. Their feet desired the respectable middle way in all matters, and when they speak of heraldic art we know that they yearned for a heraldic lion which should be gendered in spousebreach by one of John of Eltham's leopards upon a Landseer lioness, a respectable beast which might decorate without incongruity a hall chair in carved oak of Tottenham Court Road.
The heraldry manuals of Messrs. Cussans, Jenkins, Elvin and their like do not call for remark here, or, for that matter, elsewhere, for the better known Boutell may stand for an example of all of them; but the work of Woodward and Burnett, lately republished with Mr. Woodward's name alone upon the title page, demands some notice by reason of the weight and size which give these two volumes a certain distinction amongst modern books on the subject. Mr. Woodward was an excellent scholar, with a really remarkable knowledge of the vagaries of modern European heraldry, of which knowledge his pages give voluminous proof. But of the main principles of our own English heraldry, and especially of its beginnings, he was careless and ill-informed, and for the study of these things his book is worse than useless.
One and all, these modern works on heraldry depend for the language of their blazonry upon the folios and quartos from which they are the lineal descendants. In the main their writers show themselves indifferent to the early art and practice which is the only side of heraldry worthy the attention of reasonable men, and delight to clothe themselves as with a garment with a patchwork of language from those great webs of nonsense woven by the dead and gone pedants by whose authority their tangled vocabularies exist.
If we were willing to receive the instruction of these fathers it were surely better to seek their lore at first hand. But the gap between their day and ours is not to be spanned. Even the little handbooks have decided to drop overboard the mass of metaphysic and crack-brained symbolism with which they freighted their barks. We may listen, but it is with wonder
