21 6 THE ANCESTOR may put his trust in them. The recurrent appearance of the modern ' fret ' is evidence enough of the little knowledge that went to their making. A number of effigies and brasses redrawn in outline from well known book illustrations are inserted in the text, and in better company they would have helped to make a useful heraldic scrapbook, although Robert, Earl of Gloucester, and his fellows from Tewkesbury Abbey are put out of counten- ance by the curious taste which has printed under the feet of each the In Memoriam of the suburban undertaker. At the end, |in a reserved compartment, we find five samples of what Mr. Foster styles ' spurious and doubtful effigies,' which show in the main that Mr. Foster is blind to the points of difference between the work of the fourteenth century and that of the nineteenth. The splendid effigy in Westminster Abbey of Sir Bernard Brocas {In Memoriam ! ejaculates Mr. Foster) is to our amazement set down for modern work, on the strength of a clumsily restored shield which once hung upon the arm, but which, we believe, is there no longer. Throughout the book are modern illustrations of arms and ^ atchievements,' presumably those of subscribers. Mr. Foster would have one believe that these illustrations possess a considerable artistic value which we have found impossible to discover in them. One of the charges brought by Mr. Foster, and by others with more reason, against the College of Arms is that of depraving heraldic art with official conventions. But no single perversion of the forms of heraldry is lacking to these plates, which include the work of the artist of whom Mr. Foster is content to say that he admires his heraldry
- above all others.'
Do we charge the modern heralds with making quartered shields ridiculous by a rule which allows scores of meaning- less quarterings to invade the shield } Here we have several specimens of this patchwork quilt heraldry, including scores upon scores of quarterings for the Duke of Norfolk, degraded heraldry testifying to doubtful genealogy. As a reformer, Mr. Foster must move with some caution. He has evidently been warned that Leofric, Earl of Mercia, did not bear sable an eagle displayed or^ or any other blazon for that matter. So whilst the quarter wedges itself with the rest into the shield the accompanying blazon is in italics, which may indicate Mr. Foster's suspicions. But Uchtred, Lord of Raby, bears his
