A gentleman who should preserve the cavalry•horn which had been carried by his father in some celebrated war, might call it insigne fiaternum ; or if it had belonged to his great-grandfather, he might call it firo•avite insignia and yet all this might have nothing in common with the family arms. Chryxus carried on his shield a re presentation of the siege of the Capitol, and the Gauls weighing the gold of the Romans, to show that he was sprung from Brennus.
Yet who would think of asserting that the Capitol, and Gauls weighing gold, were the armorial bearings of Chryx us ? Whoever maintains this, must admit that all the im ages and figures of ancient casques, cuirasses, and shields, were armorial bearings in the same manner as these, and he will find not a few who bore the whole history of a coun try, or a few dozens of the metamorphoses, for their blazon. It seems evident then, that all these authorities prove no thing concerning the origin of heraldic bearings, more than they do concerning that of emblems or of devices ; because the signs of which they make mention do not appear either to have been fixed in their forms, or of any determined co lour, or universally hereditary. The far greater part ap pear to be the mere fictions and ornaments of poetry ; such as the chimera on the casque of Turnus; Io changed into a cow ; Argus who watched her; and Inachus with his urn, from which a stream descended on his buckler. -En. 7.* 7. The pretended arms of the tribes of Israel are entire ly the reveries of the Rabbins of the later times, who have amused themselves with imagining these figures, on the authority of certain allegorical expressions of which Jacob made use, to predict to his children the fortunes of their descendants. They assign to the tribe of Judah a lion, be cause he said to one of his sons, " Judah is a lion's whelp ; from the prey my son thou art gone up," Sce. Gen. xlix. 9. And to that of Zabulon an anchor, on account of this pro phecy," Zabulon shall dwell at the haven of the sea." Gen. xlix. 13. And as they have not been able to find any thing very appropriate for Reuben in the malediction of his fa ther, they blazon for him the mandrakes which he present ed to his mother Leah.
To say nothing of the evident absurdity of all this, the authors in whose writings these bearings are mentioned are very far from being consistent among themselves. Some give to Dan an eagle, others a serpent, and some an eagle choking a serpent. Barnabas Moreno de Vargas, indeed, blazons all the tribes of Israel in a manner different from what has been mentioned above ; as," Los de tribu de Reu ben porque su padre to comparo al aqua posieron par ar mas unas ondas de aqua : Los de Zabulon pusieron una nave," &e. Diseurs. 18. De la Noblez.
8. Neither does there appear any greater certainty among the Greek writers. Ulysses, in Lycophron, carries a dol phin on his buckler, and is accordingly styled (3`0,95ivotrni.toy; but Homer assigns to hint the figure of the giant Typheus. Agamemnon, in the Iliad, carries the gorgon's head, hut, in Pausanias, the head of a lion ; and elsewhere we find him described with one dragon on his helmet and three on his shield. As for the celebrated shields of the seven chiefs against Thebes, it is rather amusing to find, that, after all the many arguments which have been founded on the accu rate account of them in tEschylus, that great poet does not coincide, in any one particular, with the equally minute and laborious description of Euripides.
Even when the authors are perfectly consistent, the ut most that can be made out of their report is, that these warriors bore certain emblems, which may perhaps have had some mystical meaning ; but can never be proved to have been marks of noble birth, as our armorial bearings are, even though some of them may have passed from fa ther to son ; otherwise we must believe, on the credit of Suetonius, that the Domitian family carried a beard or for their arms ; because the historian, in order to mark that a red beard was a common feature in that family, says Quod insigne mansit et in posteris ejus, et magna pars rutila barbs fuerunt." (Sueton. in Nerone, c. 1.) And yet nothing can be more certain, than that passages in ancient authors, of a complexion exactly similar to this, arc the only authorities for half the armorial bearings of the Greeks and Romans. Because Seleucus had a mark on his thigh which resembled an anchor, he and all his descendants are said to have borne an anchor for their arms. It is wonder ful that Augustus is not alleged to have blazoned on his shield the Ursa Major, since it is well known that he had on his back as many moles as there are stars in that con stellation, and arranged in the same manner : (Sueton. in Aug.) The figures on the legionary shields of the time of Augustus were exactly of the same nature with those of the Greeks of the heroic ages, or of the Egyptians, Anubis and 3/Iacedo. And, upon the whole, if we lay aside the dreams of enthusiastic heralds, and scholars equally enthusiastic, who will not condescend to allow to the moderns the ho nour of inventing even the arts which they themselves des pise, we believe we shall find that to be the most rational theory which maintains, that armorial bearings were invent ed in the 10th century, perfected in the 11th, and have ac cordingly been for about seven hundred years only, in any part of the world, the distinguishing marks of families, and of noble birth.