“Gardons nous de mêler le douteux an certain, et le chimérique avec le vrai.”
Voltaire, Essai sur les Mœurs.
ntiquity has, in a greater or less degree, charms for all; and it is supposed to stamp such a value on things as nothing else can confer. This feeling, unexceptionable in itself, is liable to great abuse; especially in relation to historical matters. In States and in Families, Antiquity implies greatness, strength, and those other attributes which command veneration and respect. Hence the first historians of nations have uniformly endeavoured to carry up their annals to periods far beyond the limits of probability, thus rendering the earlier portions of their works a tissue of absurdity deduced from the misty regions of tradition, conjecture, and song.[7]
This reverence for antiquity has extended itself to genealogists, and to those who have recorded the history of sciences and inventions. Thus has it been with the earliest writers on Heraldry, a system totally unknown till within the last thousand years; but which in the fancies of its zealous admirers has been presumed to have existed, not merely in the first ages of the world, but at a period
“Ere Nature was, or Adam’s dust
Was fashioned to a man!”
We are gravely assured by a writer of the fifteenth century that heraldric ensigns were primarily borne by the ‘hierarchy of the skies,’ “At hevyn,” says the author of the Boke of St. Albans, “I will begin; where were V orderis of aungelis, and now stand but IV, in cote armoris of knawlege, encrowned ful hye with precious stones, where Lucifer with mylionys of aungelis, owt of hevyn fell into hell and odyr places, and ben holdyn ther in bondage; and all [the remaining angels] were erected in hevyn of gentill nature!”
Thus, in one short sentence, the origin both of nobility and of its external symbols is summarily disposed of. When proofs are not to be adduced, how can we regret that it is no longer?
But to descend a little lower, let us quote again the poetical language of this indisputable authority: “Adam, the begynnyng of mankind, was as a stocke unsprayed and unfloreshed,”—having neither boughs nor leaves—“and in the braunches is knowledge wich is rotun and wich is grene;” that is, if I rightly understand it, (for poetry is not always quite intelligible,) both the gentle and the ungentle, the earl and the churl, are descended from one progenitor; omnes communem parentem habent; a truth which, it is presumed, will not be called in question.
The gentility of the great ancestor of our race is stoutly contended for, and, that his claim to that distinction might not want support, Morgan, an enthusiastic armorist of the seventeenth century, has assigned him two coats of arms; one as borne in Eden—when he neither used nor needed either coat for covering or arms for defence—and another suited to his condition after the fall. The first was a plain red shield, described in the language of modern heraldry as ‘gules,’ while the arms of Eve, a shield of white, or ‘argent,’ were borne upon it as an ‘escocheon of pretence,’ she being an heiress! The arms of Abel were, as a matter of course, those of his father and mother borne ‘quarterly,’ and ensigned with a crosier, like that of a bishop, to show that he was a ‘shepheard’[8]