Page:Architectural Review and American Builders' Journal, Volume 1, 1869.djvu/331

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1868.] Heraldry. 271 ing, hy the letter T. It is the same color which we commonly call tawny. As tawny, its common adjectives in Spanish are curtido and moreno, the first referable to leather, weather-beaten, and the last swarthy. As orange, the Spaniards would call it color de naranja. In French it is tanne, tan-colored, and orange; and in animals fauve. The Italians make tawny, bruno, abbronzato, and fulvo ; and orange, color oVarancia. In German, orange-color is pomeranzen- farbe; and tawny, lohfarben, braungelb, and schivarzgelb, the word lok, lohe, being tanning-bark, and the word gelb, yellow. It will be seen that our own word fulvous, Latin fulvus, is included in these linguistic variations. It is per- ceptible that in none of these languages are orange and tawny exact synonymes, as they seem to have been taken by the heralds, orange being bright, and tawny dull, of the same general combinations of colors. Concerning tenne, Leigh says : " It is a color of worship, and of some heralds called brusk, most commonly borne by French gentlemen, but very few do bear it in England." "It is," adds he, "the surest color, that is, of so bright a hue, being compounded, for it is made of two bright colors, red and yellow." Guillim says, " This color is used by the French;" and the French heralds observe, " That the English use it." JMacKenzy thinks Mr. Guillim is in the wrong, and the French in the right ; "for," says he, "the French use it not, but the English do." Leigh instances two ancient English families that have long borne tawiry in their arms, namely : Hounzaker and Finers ; but their blazons do not seem to have come down to us. George Field, in his "Grammar of Coloring," makes " the engaved lines for tenne run as most heralds give them for sanguine, namely, crossed in saltire, and vice versa; but this is undoubtedly a mistake, arising probably from Coates having, firstly : either omitted the engrav- ing of sanguine altogether, or carelessly described the lines for tenne, in lieu of those for sanguine, by " it is expressed in engraving," &c, just after instancing the houses of the Eounzakers and the Finers as containing tenne; and, sec- ondly: describing tenne by "lines diag- onal from the sinister chief and trans- verse. " Coates' figures are, for sanguine, diagonal lines, conforming to the direc- tion of both limbs of a St. Andrew's cross ; for tenne, horizontal lines, crossed by others from the sinister chief to the dexter base. This last gives a third variation of lines for tenne ; but, allow- ing sanguine to be definitely fixed, can cause no confusion, for in each of the three the lines cross at an oblique angle, and neither of the variations at all re- sembles the lines appropriated to any other tincture. Coates tells us, " That this color is little or not at all used by the French,

  • * * sufficiently appears by its not

being so much as named by Colombiere and others of France ; nor do I find that, among the English, Sylvanus Morgan takes any notice of it. Spelman, in his Aspilogia, will scarce allow of this color, though, as he there observes, called wor- shipful by Leigh, yet just below he places it among the colors, assigns to it in heaven the Dragon's Head, and among precious stones the hyacinth. In Latin he calls it amaranticus. I find it not anywhere used in Spanish." Kent says, some heralds term Tawny, Bruske, but the proper name is Tenne, deduced from the French, Tanne, or the Italian Tanetto, a chestnut color, to which it is not unlike. It is not com- pared to a planet, the seven being taken up already, but to the Drag- on's Head, a star, which partakes of the nature of a planet, and, among stones, to the Jacinth. This being one of the stainand fstainant, staining, for abas- ing] colors, cau have no very good inter- pretation set on it. Leigh saith, it sig- nifies vain-glory. It is also written Ten- ney, the true English sound.