The sixth and last, the which the knight himself
With such a graceful courtesy deliver’d?
Thai. He seems to be a stranger; but his present is
A wither’d branch, that’s only green at top;
The motto, ‘In hac spe vivo.’
Sim. A pretty moral;
From the dejected state wherein he is,
He hopes by you his fortunes yet may flourish.”
As with the ornaments “in silk and gold,” which Mary Queen of Scotland worked on the bed of her son James, or with those in “the lady’s closet” at Hawsted, we trace them up to their originals, and pronounce them, however modified, to be derived from the Emblem-books of their age; so, with respect to the devices which the six knights bore on their shields, we conclude that these have their sources in books of the same character, or in the genius of the author who knew so well how to contrive and how to execute. Emblems beyond a doubt they are, though not engraved on our author’s page, as they were on the escutcheons of the knightly company. Take the device and motto of the gnats or butterflies and the candle; we trace them from Vænius, Camerarius, and Whitney, to Paradin, from Paradin to Symeoni, and from Symeoni to Giles Corrozet,—at every step we pronounce them Emblems,—and should pass the same judgment, though we could not trace them at all. It is the same with these devices in the Triumph Scene of Pericles; we discover the origin of some of them in Emblem works of, or before Shakespeare’s era,—and where we fail to discover, there we attribute invention, invention guided and perfected by masters in the art of fashioning pictures to portray thoughts by means of things. We will, however, in due order consider the devices and mottoes of these six knights who came to honour the king’s daughter.
The first knight is the Knight of Sparta,—