Careful observance of customary rules by no means precludes variety of treatment, however, but, on the contrary, affords ample scope for excellence of design in stating the heraldic facts with perfect accuracy. As already said, it is this symbolic statement that gives heraldry its peculiar value in decoration, for a similar effect of mass and line could doubtless be got in another way, but not the same quality of personal allusion. It will therefore be necessary to ascertain how to distinguish in some way between the unessential, and therefore available, variation which is so valuable to design, and such departure from accurate rendering of the subject as constitutes heraldic mis-statement that may stultify the whole work. In this important respect guidance may be found, as already intimated, in the system of description called Blazon, in which should be expressed all that is essential, and from which everything that is not essential should be omitted. CHAPTER III Heraldic Rules With the regular establishment of heraldry the need for a technical method of describing the various bearings at once made itself felt, and the system of Blazon was the result. Like the heraldry which it described it was admirably adapted to its purpose, being simple, perfectly explicit of the character, pose, and position of its subject, without excessive minuteness in detail. In time, however, it not only became more complicated, as was natural, but it at last became a vehicle for the pedantry which, succeeding the artistic feeling of the Middle Ages, expended itself in the making of unnecessary rules. By the time the seventeenth century was reached it seemed to be thought to show the height of heraldic knowledge to insist on every insignificant detail, and so prevent the artist from deviating into anything more excellent than was customary at the moment. Indeed this pedantic affection for exactness in trifles sometimes makes one wonder that in blazoning a maiden’s face it was not thought necessary to mention that it included _a nose between two eyes in chief and a mouth in base_ ppr. As a guide to the degree beyond which freedom of treatment may not go without destroying the heraldic validity of the subject, blazoning should be assiduously practised, however irksome and pedantic it may appear, until a technical note of any armorials can be written with precision and such a description be translated into a sketch with equal certainty. After studying the system as explained herein, I would recommend as practice the endeavouring to properly describe the armorials in an illustrated work, a Peerage for instance, with subsequent reference to the authentic blazon for confirmation or correction. Conversely a sketch should be made from a blazon, and then compared in a similar way with the illustration. For this purpose Foster’s _Peerage and Baronetage_, 1881-3, with its beautiful woodcuts after drawings by Dom Anselm and Forbes Nixon, will be of