To the Heraldry of Imaginative Devices might be referred the greater part of the coats of arms, badges and cognizances by which noble and gentle families are distinguished. To conclude this branch of our subject, I will name a woodcut which was probably peculiar to Geffrey Whitney at the time when Shakespeare wrote, though accessible to the dramatist from other sources; it is the fine frontispiece to the _Choice of Emblemes_, setting forth the heraldic honours and arms of Robert, Earl of Leycester, and in part of his brother, Ambrose, Earl of Warwick. Each of these noblemen bore the same crest, and it was, what Shakespeare, _2 Henry VI._ (act v. sc. 1, l. 203, vol. v. p. 215), terms “the rampant bear chained to the ragged staff.” [Illustration: _Whitney, 1586._] How long this had been the cognizance of the Earls of Warwick, and whether it was borne by all the various families of the Saxon and Norman races who held the title,—by the Beauchamps, the Nevilles, and the Dudleys, admits of doubt; but it is certain that such was the cognizance in the reign of Henry VI. and in that of Elizabeth. According to Dugdale’s _Antiquities of Warwickshire_, edition 1730, p. 398, the monument of Thomas Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick in Edward III.’s time, has a lion, not a bear; and a lamb for his Countess, the Lady Katherine Mortimer. Also on the monument of another Earl (p. 404), who died in 1401, the bear does not appear; but on the monument of Richard Beauchamp, who died “the last day of Aprill, the year of our lord god 1434,” the inscriptions are crowded with bears, instead of commas and colons; and the recumbent figure of the Earl has a muzzled bear at his feet (p. 410). The Nevilles now succeeded to the title, and a limner’s or designer’s very curious bill, of the fifteenth year of Henry VI., 1438, shows that the bear and ragged staff were then both in use and in honour,— “First CCCC Pencels bete with the Raggidde staffe of silver pris the pece v d. 08_l._ 06_s._ 00 Item for a grete Stremour for the Ship of XI yerdis length and IIII yerdis in brede, with a grete Bere and Gryfon holding a Raggid staffe, poudrid full of raggid staves; and for a grate Crosse of S. George for the lymmynge and portraying 01 . 06 . 08 Item XVIII Standardes of worsted, entretailled with the Bere and a Chayne, pris the pece xii d. 00 . 18 . 00” Among the monuments in the Lady Chapel at Warwick is a full length figure of “Ambrose Duddeley,” who died in 1589, and of a muzzled bear crouching at his feet. Robert Dudley, Earl of Leycester, his brother, died in 1588; and on his magnificent tomb, in the same chapel, is seen the same cognizance of the bear and ragged staff. The armorial bearings, however, are a little different from those which Whitney figures.