THE SHIELD: ITS VARIETIES OF FORM.--The front face of an heraldic Shield is generally flat; but sometimes the curved edges are made to appear as if they had been slightly rounded off. Some early Shields are represented as _bowed_--hollowed, that is, in order to cover more closely the person of the bearer, and consequently having a convex external contour, as in No. 39. In early examples of bowed Shields the whole of the armorial blazonry is sometimes displayed on the face of that portion of the Shield which is shown. A _ridge_, dividing them in pale, but not necessarily in any way acting as an heraldic dividing line, appears in many Shields, and particularly in those of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The large elongated Shields that have been entitled “kite-shaped,” and which were in use in the days of RICHARD I. and amongst the Barons of Magna Charta, were superseded by the smaller “heater-shaped” Shield as early as the reign of HENRY III. The most beautiful forms of this Shield are represented in Nos. 40, 41, and 42: of these, No. 40 has its curves described about the sides of an inverted equilateral triangle, and then they are prolonged by vertical lines towards the chief: in Nos. 41, 42, the sides curve from the chief to the base. The forms of Shields admit of various slight modifications, to adjust them to varying conditions. Towards the close of the fourteenth century the form of the Shield is found to undergo some singular changes: and, at later periods, changes in form of this kind became generally prevalent. Nos. 43, 44, exemplify such changes as these: they also show the curved notch that was cut in the dexter chief of the Shields of the same periods, to permit the lance to pass through it as the Shield hung down on the breast: a Shield so pierced is said to be _à bouche_. The Surface of the Shield, No. 43, which is in the Episcopal palace at Exeter, is wrought into a series of shallow hollows, which curve gracefully from the central ridge, some to the dexter, and others to the sinister. Such a Shield as this may be consistently used in our own Heraldry: but, since now we do not associate lances laid in rest with our heraldic Shields, it appears desirable that we should not draw our Shields _à bouche_. In recent Heraldry the Shield has commonly been made to appear such an unsightly and un-heraldic deformity as is represented in No. 45. Instead of a true heraldic Shield also, a rounded oval with a convex surface, called a _cartouche_, or _cartouche shield_, No. 46, is occasionally used for the display of armorial blazonry; or a circle is substituted for such an oval. These cartouches probably owe their origin to the usage of placing a Garter of the Order about a Shield (prevalent in the fifteenth century), and to a subsequent period, when we find the omission of the exact outline of the actual Shield. But their frequent appearance in Ecclesiastical Heraldry suggests that