It may appear almost impossible, even on a “Bed of State,” to work twenty-nine Emblems and the arms of Scotland, England, and France, “severally by themselves and all quartered in many places of the bed,”—but a bed, probably of equal antiquity, was a few years since, if not now, existing at Hinckley in Leicestershire, on which the same number “of emblematical devices, and Latin mottoes in capital letters conspicuously introduced,” had found space and to spare. All these emblems are, I believe, taken from books of Shakespeare’s time, or before him; as, “An ostrich with a horseshoe in the beak,” the word, _Spiritus durissima coquit_; “a cross-bow at full stretch,” the word, _Ingenio superat vires_. “A hand playing with a serpent,” the word, _Quis contra nos?_ “The tree of life springing from the cross on an altar,”[78] the word, _Sola vivit in illo_. (See _Gentleman’s Magazine_, vol. lxxxi. pt. 2, p. 416, Nov. 1811.) NVTRISCO·ET·EXTINGVO [Illustration: _Paolo Jovio, 1561._] DONEC TOTVM IMPLEAT ORBEN [Illustration: _Paolo Jovio, 1561._] Of the use of Emblematical devices in the ornamenting of houses, it will be sufficient to give the instance recorded in “The History and Antiquities of Hawsted and Hardwick, in the county of Suffolk, by the Rev. Sir John Cullum, Bart:” the 2nd edition, royal 4to, London, 1813, pp. 159–165. This History makes it evident that in the reign of James I., if not earlier, Emblems were so known and admired as to have been freely employed in adorning a closet for the last Lady Drury. “They mark the taste of an age that delighted in quaint wit, and laboured conceits of a thousand kinds,” says Sir John; nevertheless, there were _forty-one_ of them in “the painted closet” at Hawsted, and which, at the time of his writing, were put up in a small apartment at Hardwick. To all of them, as for King James’s bed, and for the “very antient oak wooden bedstead, much gilt and ornamented,” at Hinckley, there were a Latin motto and a device. Some of them we now present to the reader, adding occasionally to our author’s account a further notice of the sources whence they were taken: Emblem 1. _Ut parta labuntur_,—“As procured they are slipping away.” “A monkey, sitting in a window and scattering money into the streets, is among the emblems of Gabriel Simeon:” it is also in our own English Whitney, p. 169, with the word, _Malè parta malè delabuntur_,—“Badly gotten, badly scattered.” Emblem 5. _Quò tendis?_—“Whither art thou going?” “A human tongue with bats’ wings, and a scaly contorted tail, mounting into the air,” “is among the _Heroical Devises of Paradin_:” leaf 65 of edition Anvers, 1562.