Paolo Jovio, 1561.
Of the use of Emblematical devices in the ornamenting of houses, it will be sufficient to give the instance recorded in “The History and Antiquities of Hawsted and Hardwick, in the county of Suffolk, by the Rev. Sir John Cullum, Bart:” the 2nd edition, royal 4to, London, 1813, pp. 159–165. This History makes it evident that in the reign of James I., if not earlier, Emblems were so known and admired as to have been freely employed in adorning a closet for the last Lady Drury. “They mark the taste of an age that delighted in quaint wit, and laboured conceits of a thousand kinds,” says Sir John; nevertheless, there were forty-one of them in “the painted closet” at Hawsted, and which, at the time of his writing, were put up in a small apartment at Hardwick. To all of them, as for King James’s bed, and for the “very antient oak wooden bedstead, much gilt and ornamented,” at Hinckley, there were a Latin motto and a device. Some of them we now present to the reader, adding occasionally to our author’s account a further notice of the sources whence they were taken:
Emblem 1. Ut parta labuntur,—“As procured they are slipping away.” “A monkey, sitting in a window and scattering money into the streets, is among the emblems of Gabriel Simeon:” it is also in our own English Whitney, p. 169, with the word, Malè parta malè delabuntur,—“Badly gotten, badly scattered.”
Emblem 5. Quò tendis?—“Whither art thou going?” “A human tongue with bats’ wings, and a scaly contorted tail, mounting into the air,” “is among the Heroical Devises of Paradin:” leaf 65 of edition Anvers, 1562.
Emblem 8. Jam satis,—“Already enough.” “Some trees, leafless, and torn up by the roots; with a confused landscape. Above, the sun, and a rainbow;” a note adds, “the most faire and bountiful queen of France Katherine used the sign of the rainbow for her armes, which is an infallible sign of peaceable calmeness and tranquillitie.”—Paradin. Paradin’s words, ed. 1562, leaf 38, are “Madame Catherine, treschretienne Reine de France, a pour Deuise l’Arc celeste, ou Arc en ciel: qui est le vrai signe de clere serenité & tranquilité de Paix.”
Emblem 20. Dum transis, time,—“While thou art crossing, fear.” “A pilgrim traversing the earth: with a staff, and a light coloured hat, with a cockle shell in it.” In Hamlet, act iv. sc. 5, l. 23, vol. viii. p. 129,—
“How should I your true love know
From another one?
By his cockle hat and staff,