The patricians of our day to a certain extent carry out the _jus imaginum_ of antiquity, only substituting painted canvas for sculptured marble or modelled wax; and there is no sight better calculated to inspire respect for dignity of station than the gallery of some antient hall hung with a long series of family portraits; in which, as in a kind of physiognomical pedigree, the speculative mind may also find matter of agreeable contemplation. The _jus imaginum_ doubtless originated in the same class of feelings that gave birth to heraldry, but there is no further connexion or analogy between the two. It is to hereditary shields and hereditary banners we must limit the true meaning of heraldry, and all attempts to find these in the classical era will end in a disappointment as inevitable as that which accompanies the endeavour to gather "grapes of thorns or figs of thistles." [Illustration] CHAPTER II. Authentic History of Heraldry. [Illustration: (John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, temp. Hen. VI, in his surcoat or coat of arms.)[32]] "Vetera quæ nunc sunt fuerunt olim _nova_." "L'histoire du blazon! mais c'est l'histoire tout entière de notre pays!" _Jouffroy d'Eschavannes._ Having given some illustrations of the desire of referring the heraldric system to times of the most remote antiquity, and shown something of the misapplication of learning to prove what was incapable of proof, let us now leave the obscure byways of those mystifiers of truth and fabricators of error, and emerge into the more beaten path presented to us in what may be called the historical period, which is confined within the last eight centuries. The history of the sciences, like that of nations, generally has its fabulous as well as its historical periods, and this is eminently the case with heraldry; yet in neither instance is there any exact line of demarcation by which the former are separable from the latter. This renders it the duty of a discriminating historian to act with the utmost caution, lest, on the one hand, truths of a remote date should be sacrificed because surrounded by the circumstances of fiction, and lest, on the other, error should be too readily admitted as fact, because it comes to us in a less questionable shape; and I trust I shall not be deemed guilty of misappropriation if I apply to investigations like the present, that counsel which primarily refers to things of much greater import, namely, "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good."