Fuller justly says that “the plainer the coat is, the more ancient and honorable.” He adds, that “two colors are necessary and most highly honorable: three are very highly honorable; _four_ commendable; _five_ excusable; more disgraceful.” He must have been a gastronomic King-at-Arms, who so loaded a “coat” with fish, flesh, and fowl, that an observer remarked, “it was well victualled enough to stand a siege.” _Or_ is the richest coloring, but, as Fuller again says, “Herbs _vert_, being natural, are better than _Or_.” He describes a “_Bend_ as the best _ordinary_, being a belt athwart,” but a coat bruised with a bar sinister is hardly a distinction to be proud of. If the heralds of George the Second’s time looked upon that monarch as the son of Count Königsmark, as Jacobite-minded heralds may have been malignant enough to do, they no doubt mentally drew the degrading bar across the royal arms, and tacitly denied the knighthood conferred by what they, in such foolish case, would have deemed an illegitimate hand. Alluding to reasons for some bearings, Fuller tells us that, “whereas the Earls of Oxford anciently gave their ‘coats’ plain, quarterly _gules_ and _or_, they took afterward in the first a _mullet_ or _star-argent_, because the chief of the house had a falling-star, as it was said, alighting on his shield as he was fighting in the Holy Land.” It is to be observed that when treating of precedency, Fuller places knights, or “soldiers” with seamen, civilians, and physicians, and after saints, confessors, prelates, statesmen, and judges. Knights and physicians he seems to have considered as equally terrible to life; but in his order of placing he was led by no particular principle, for among the lowest he places “learned writers,” and “benefactors to the public.” He has, indeed, one principle, as may be seen, wherein he says, “I place first princes, good manners obliging all other persons to follow them, as religion obliges me to follow God’s example by a royal recognition of that original precedency, which he has granted to his vicegerents.” The Romans are said to have established the earliest known order of knighthood; and the members at one time wore rings, as a mark of distinction, as in later times knights wore spurs. The knights of the Holy Roman Empire were members of a modern order, whose sovereigns are not, what they would have themselves considered, descendants of the Cæsars. If we only knew what our own Round Table was, and where it stood, we should be enabled to speak more decisively upon the question of the chevaliers who sat around it. But it is undecided whether the table was not really a house. At it, or in it, the knights met during the season of Pentecost, but whether the assembly was collected at Winchester or Windsor no one seems able to determine; and he would impart no particularly valuable knowledge even if he could.