[K] "Another stride that has been taken appears in the perishing of heraldry. Whilst the privileges of nobility are passing to the middle class, the badge is discredited, and the titles of lordship are getting musty and cumbersome. I wonder that sensible men have not been already impatient of them. They belong, with wigs, powder, and scarlet coats, to an earlier age, and may be advantageously consigned, with paint and tattoo, to the dignitaries of Australia and Polynesia."--R.W. EMERSON (English Traits). 222. All dress is thus heraldic; a soldier's dress only more definitely so, in proclaiming the thing he means to die as well as to live for; but all is heraldic, from the beggar's rag to the king's diadem; it may be involuntarily, it may be, insolently; but when the characters of men are determined, and wise, their dress becomes heraldic reverently, and in order. "Togam e tugurio proferre uxorem Raciliam jubet;" and Edie Ochiltree's blue gown is as honourably heraldic as a knight's ermine. 223. The beginning of heraldry, and of all beautiful dress, is, however, simply in the wearing of the skins of slain animals. You may discredit, as much as you choose, the literal meaning of that earliest statement, "Unto Adam also, and to his wife, did the Lord God make coats of skin, and clothed them:" but the figurative meaning of it only becomes the stronger. For if you think of the skins of animals as giving the four great materials of dress--leather, fur, wool, and down, you will see in this verse the summary of what has ever since taken place in the method of the providence of the Maker of Man and beast, for the clothing of the naked creature who was to rule over the rest. 224. The first practical and savage use of such dress was that the skin of the head of the beast became a covering for the head of its slayer; the skin of its body his coat; the skin of the fore legs was knotted in front, and the skin of the hind legs and tail became tassels, the jags of the cut edges forming a kind of fringe here and there. You have thus the first conception of a helmet with the mane of the animal for its crest or plume, and the first conception of a cuirass variously fringed, striped, or spotted; in complete accoutrement for war, you have to add spear, (or arrow), and shield. The spear is properly a beam of wood, iron pointed; the shield a disk of leather, iron fronted. And armed strength for conflict is symbolized for all future time by the Greeks, under the two types of Heracles and Athena; the one with the low lion's crest and the arrow, the other with the high horse's crest, and the spear; one with the lion-skin, the other with the goat-skin;--both with the round shield.