185 



We now turn to Chivalry ; and here we find Symbolism 

 organized and cultivated as a science, under the title of Heraldry, 

 with complete paraphernalia. Their society was a College of Arms ; 

 their professors were Kings of Arms; and their ushers were Heralds. 

 They had missionaries in the Troubadours, who nursed iu those 

 dark times the love of poetry and song. By means of this singular 

 institution a power was created which, exercised a wonderful 

 influence. The most powerful of the nobility bowed to its sway, 

 and its laws were as absolute as those of the church itself The 

 proudest monarch would have deemed the chopping off his golden 

 spurs — the symbol of his knighthood — an evil not inferior to the 

 loss of throne, lands, or power. Gallant feats of arms were 

 considered amply repaid when their heroes were permitted to 

 perpetuate them by the acquisition of some symbolic device to 

 add to their armorial bearings ; and in the Crusades we have the 

 solution of the importation of oriental symbolic animals into the 

 heraldic system of the less imaginative, but not less superstitious, 

 people of the west. The Phoenix, the Salamander, the Chimera, 

 find their origin here ; so do Dragons and Wyverns. The Mer- 

 maid (the western version of the Syren), the Cockatrice, the 

 Basilisk and the Unicorn, all of evidently eastern origin, and 

 symbolic in their combinations. Indeed the mediaeval knight, 

 bearing on his helmet a boar's head, surmounted with plumes of 

 feathers ; a coat over his armour quartered with lions and panthers, 

 and bearing on his shield a flying spur, is only the development of 

 the same train of ideas embodied by the Indian in his war paint, 

 alluded to in the opening of my lecture, and would proclaim, 

 without any necessity for the herald's flourish, that he was as 

 strong, as brutal, as fierce, and as fleet a foe as any savage of them 

 all. 



Sometimes, indeed, popular ignorance will persist in makino- 

 mistakes ; and some emblazonments have become sadly perverted 

 from their original meaning. There is no more remarkable 

 instance of this than in the patron saint of England, St. Geort^e, 

 who is represented on horseback, slaying a dragon. The St. 

 George alluded to is said to be George, Bishop of Cappadocia 



