The days of the Crusaders were the days of romance. "From climes so fertile in monsters as those through which these adventurers passed," observes Dallaway, "we cannot wonder that any fiction was readily received by superstitious admirers, whose credulity nothing could exhaust." The narrations of those warriors who had the good fortune to revisit their native lands were eagerly seized upon by that new class of literary aspirants, the Romance writers, by means of whose wonder-exciting productions, giants, griffins, dragons, and monsters of every name, became familiarized to all. For ages the existence of these products of a "gothick fancy" was never called in question. The early travellers, such as Marco Polo and our own renowned Sir John Maundevile, pandered to the popular taste, and what those chroniclers of 'grete merveyles' reported in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was religiously believed in the sixteenth, and hardly questioned even in the seventeenth. In the early part of this period, indeed, it can scarcely be expected that the multitude at least should have been disabused of the delusion, when the existence of witchcraft was considered an essential part of the common creed,--when a learned herald, like Guillim, could write a tirade against "divellish witches that doe worke the destruction of silly infants, and also of cattel,"--and when the supreme magistrate of these realms could instigate the burning of deformed old women, and write treatises upon "Dæmonology," which, among other matters, taught his loyal and undoubting subjects that these maleficæ were wont to perform their infernal pranks by means of circles, some of which were _square_, and others _triangular_! It was reserved for the advancing light of the eighteenth century to break the spell, and scatter these monsters to the winds. This, however, was not to be done at once; for our grandfathers, and even our fathers, gathered their knowledge of popular _natural_ history from a book which contained minute descriptions of the _dragon_, 'adorned with cuts' of that remarkable hexapede, for the edification of its admiring readers! Under the category of Heraldric Monsters the following deserve especial notice:-- The Allerion Chimera Cockatrice Dragon Griffin Harpy Lyon-Dragon Lyon-Poisson Mermaid Montygre Martlet Opinicus Pegasus Sphinx Sagittary Satyr Unicorn Wyvern Winged Lyon Winged Bull.[117]