THE ANCESTOR 39 For those who would rescue heraldry from the hands of these respectable men and from the hands of their brother the engraver of book plates there is no help from the compilers of the little 'handbooks of heraldry/ Mr. BoutelFs work, which for want of a better is often recommended to the student antiquary, is of the smallest service. It is true that in the warm periods of his preface he seeks ' from the authority, the practise, and the associations of the early heraldry of the best and most artistic eras, to derive a heraldry which we may rightly consider to be our own, and which we may transmit with honour to our successors.' But in the next sentence Mr. Boutell wavers. He does not ' suggest the adoption, for present use, of an obsolete system,* so we gather that the ^ early heraldry of the best and most artistic eras ' is not for Mr. Boutell's readers after all. Lower down in the page he lashes himself again to the repudiation of ' the acceptance and maintenance amongst ourselves of a most degenerate sub- stitute for a noble science,' and yearns ' to revive the fine old heraldry of the past,' yet it seems that on no account we are ' to adjust ourselves to the circumstances of its first develop- ment ' or to ' reproduce its original expressions.' So long as we were ' animated by the spirit of the early heralds ' we might
- lead our heraldry onward with the advance of time,' but
unhappily for Mr. Boutell he was a child of the spacious days of the Great Exhibition, and he is unmistakably of his own period when we find him begging his pupils on no account to draw their heraldic beasts as freely as they appear on the shield of John of Eltham. Mr. Boutell may not have 'led his heraldry onward' in any notable degree, but in this matter his exhortations bore fruit. No one of late years has drawn shields resembling that flower of fourteenth century art which is on the arm of the Lord John of Eltham. The real importance of such a work as English Heraldry lies in its popularity, a popularity encouraged by the excellent en- gravings of ancient seals and the like with which the book is illustrated, whereby in spite of its slender scholarship and its injudicious commonplaces it is become the manual of most people studying heraldry in England. Through it all, and through all the dozen little books its fellows, runs with pathetic insistence the hope that, by avoiding too close an intimacy with the medieval side of a frankly medieval art, heraldry, rising from its tomb in some familiar and mid-Victorian shape, may
