390 PRÆTERITA-II

on the panel of his own brougham. It appeared, on inquiry at the Heralds’ Office, that there was indeed a shield appertaining to a family, of whom nothing particular was known, by the name of Rusken:¹ Sable, a chevron, argent, between six lance-heads, argent. This, without any evidence of our relation to the family, we could not, of course, be permitted to use without modification: but the King-at-Arms registered it as ours, with the addition of three crosses crosslets on the chevron, gules, (in case of my still becoming a clergyman!); and we carried home, on loan from the college, a book of crests and mottoes; crests being open to choice in modern heraldry, (if one does not by chance win them,) as laconic expressions of personal character, or achievement.

Over which book, I remember, though too vaguely, my father’s reasoning within himself, that a merchant could not with any propriety typify himself by Lord Marmion’s falcon, or Lord Dudley’s bear;² that, though we were all extremely fond of dogs, any doggish crest would be taken for an extremely minor dog, or even puppy, by the public; while vulpine types, whether of heads or brushes, were wholly out of our way; and at last, faute de mieux, and with some idea, I fancy, of the beast’s resolution in taking and making its own way through difficulties, my father, with the assent, if not support, of my mother and Mary, fixed, forsooth, upon a boar’s head, as reasonably proud, without claim to be patrician; under-written by the motto “Age quod agis.” Some ten or twelve years, I suppose, after this, beginning to study heraldry with attention, I apprehended, that, whether a knight’s war-cry, or a peaceful yeoman’s saying, the words on the scroll of a crest could not be a piece of advice to other people, but must be always a declaration of the bearer’s own mind. Whereupon I

¹ [On the name, see the Introduction; above, pp. lix.-lxi.]

² [For the falcon in Scott’s Marmion, see Vol. XXXIII. p. 500 n.; for the bear and ragged staff (the crest of the Earls of Warwick from Saxon times), see Kenilworth, ch. vii. (“The bear brooks no one to cross his awful path”-spoken by Dudley, Lord Leicester, son of Dudley, Earl of Warwick).]

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