Shakespeare and the Emblem Writers

PHOTO-LITH PLATES.

PLATE.	SUBJECT.	SOURCE.	PAGE.
I.	Dedication Plate	Alciat’s Emb. Ed. 1661	1
Ia.	Tableau of Human Life,—Cebes, B.C. 330.	De Hooghe, 1670	13
Ib.	Tableau of Human Life,—Cebes, B.C. 330.	Old Print	68
II.	Christ’s Adoption of the Human Soul	Otho Vænius, Divini Amoris Emb. 1615	32
III.	Creation	Symeoni’s Ovid, Ed. 1559, p. 13	35
IV.	Title-page,—Speculum Humanæ Salvationis.	A MS. of the 1st Edition, 1440	44
V.	Leaf 31,—Speculum Humana Salvationis.	A MS. of the 1st Edition, 1440	44
VI.	A page from the Biblia Pauperum.	Noel Humphreys, p. 40, Pl. 2	46
VII.	Historia S. Joan. per Figuras,—Corser Collection.	Tracing from the Block-book	49
VIII.	Historia S. Joan. per Figuras,—Corser Collection.	Tracing from the Block-book	49
IX.	Title-page of Seb. Brandt’s Fool-freighted Ship	Locher’s Stultifera Navis, Ed. 1497	57
X.	Title-page of Van der Veen’s Emblems.	Adams Appel, Ed. 1642	132
XI.	Fall of Satan	Boissard’s Theat. Vit. Hum. 1596 Ed.	133
XII.	Occasion seized	David’s Occasio arr. &c. Ed. 1605	265
XIII.	The Zodiac	Brucioli, Della Sphera, Ed. 1543	353
XIV.	Life as a Theatre	Boissard’s Theat. Vit. Hum. Ed. 1596.	405
XV.	Seven Ages of Life,—an early Block-Print, British Museum.	Archæologia, vol. xxxv. 1853, p. 167.	407
XVI.	Providence making Rich and making Poor.	Coornhert, Ed. 1585	489
XVII.	Time flying	Otho Vænius, Emblemata, Ed. 1612.	491

Hesius, 1636.
Stans uno capit omnia puncto.

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SHAKESPEARE

AND THE

EMBLEM-WRITERS OF HIS AGE.

CHAPTER I. EMBLEMS, AND THEIR VARIETIES, WITH SOME EARLY EXAMPLES.

WHAT Emblems are, in the general acceptation of the word in modern times, is well set forth in Cotgrave’s Dictionary, Art. Emblema, where he defines an emblem to be, “a picture and short posie, expressing some particular conceit;” and very pithily by Francis Quarles, when he says,—“an Emblem is but a silent Parable.” Though less terse and clear than either of these, we may also take Bacon’s description, in his Advancement of Learning, bk. v. chap. 5;—“Embleme deduceth conceptions intellectuall to images sensible, and that which is sensible more forcibly strikes the memory, and is more easily imprinted than that which is intellectual.”

By many writers of Emblem books, perhaps by the majority in their practice if not in their theories, there is very little difference of meaning observed between Symbols and Emblems. We find, however, in other Authors a more exact usage of the word Symbol. The Greek poet Pindar^[1] speaks of “a trustworthy symbol, or sign, concerning a future action,” or from which the future can be conjectured; Iago, recounting the power of Desdemona over Othello, act ii. scene 3, l. 326, declares it were easy

“for her

To win the Moor, were’t to renounce his baptism,

All seals and symbols of redeemed sin;”

and Cudworth, in his True Intellectual System of the Universe, ed. 1678, p. 388, after giving Aristotle’s assertion “that Numbers were the Causes of the Essence of other things,” adds, “though we are not ignorant, how the Pythagoreans made also the Numbers within the Decad, to be Symbols of things.”

Claude Marginality, or Minōs, the famous commentator on the Emblems of Andreas Alciatus, in his Tract, Concerning Symbols, Coats of Arms, and Emblems,—eds. 1581, or 1608, or 1614,—maintains there is a clear distinction between emblems and symbols, which, as he affirms, “many persons rashly and ignorantly confound together.”^[2] “We confess,” he adds, “that the force of the Emblem depends upon the Symbol: but they differ, I say, as Man and Animal; for people who have any judgment at all know, that here of a certainty the latter is taken more generally, the former more specially.” Mignault’s meaning may be carried out by saying, that all men are animals,—but all animals are not men; so all emblems are symbols, tokens, or signs, but all symbols are not emblems;—the two possess affinity but not identity,—they have no absolute convertibility of the one for the other.

Symeoni, 1559.

An example of Emblem and Symbol united occurs in Symeoni’s Dedication^[3] “To Madame Diana of Poitiers, Dutchess of Valentinois;” for Emblem, there are “picture and short posie” expressing the particular conceit, “Quodcunque petit, consequitur,”—She attains whatever she seeks; and for Symbols, or signs, the sun, the temple, the dogs, the arrow, and the stag; and for exposition, the stanza;

“Sante le Muse son, santa è Diana,

Caste son quelle, et casta è questa anchora.

Dalle Muse il Sol mai non s’ allontana,

Et d’ Apollo Diana vnica è suora.

Nelle Muse è d’ Amore ogni arte vana,

Et de i lacci d’ Amor Diana è fuora.

Chi fia Diana quel dunque che dica,

Che voi non siete delle Muse amica?”

Thus metrically rendered,

“Holy the Muses are, holy is Diana,

Chaste are they, and chaste also is she.

From the Muses the Sun indeed moves not afar,

And alone of Apollo Diana is sister.

Against the Muses Love’s every art is vain,

And free is Diana from all snares of Love.

Who then is the Diana that says,

That you are not a friend of the Muses?”

The word emblem, ἐμβλημα, is one that has strayed very widely from its first meaning, and yet by a sort of natural process, as the apple grows out of the crab, its signification now is akin to what it was in distant ages. It then denoted the thing, whether implement or ornament, placed in, or thrown on, and so joined to, some other thing. Thus a word of cognate origin, Epiblēs, in the Iliad, bk. xxiv. l. 453,^[4] denoted the bolt of fir that held fast the door;—it was something put against the door,—the peg or bar that kept it from opening. So in the Odyssey, bk. ii. l. 37,^[5] the sceptre, the emblem of command, was the baton which the herald Peisēnor placed in the hand of the son of Ulysses; and again in the Iliad, bk. xiii. l. 319, 20,^[6] the flaming torch was the implement which the son of Kronos might throw on the swift ships.

Of the changes through which a word may pass, “the word Emblem presents one of the most remarkable instances.” They cannot be better given than in the “Sketch of that branch of Literature called Books of Emblems,” read in 1848 before the Literary and Philosophical Society of Liverpool, by the late Joseph Brooks Yates, Esq. He says of the word Emblem, pp. 8, 9,—“its present signification, ‘Type or allusive representation,’ is of comparatively modern use, while its original meaning is become obsolete. Among the Greeks an Emblem (εμβλημα), derived from ενβαλλειν, meant something thrown in or inserted after the fashion of what we now call Marquetry and Mosaic work, or in the form of a detached ornament to be affixed to a pillar, a tablet, or a vase, and put off or on, as there might be occasion. Pliny, in his Natural History,” bk. xxxiii. c. 12, “mentions an artist called Pytheus, who executed works of this last description in silver, one of which, intended to be attached to a jar (in phialæ emblemate), represented Ulysses and Diomed carrying off the Palladium.^[7] It weighed two ounces, and sold for 10,000 sesterces = 80l. 14s. 7d. of our money. According to one ancient manuscript of Pliny, it sold for double that amount. Marcus Curtius leaping into the gulph forms the subject of a beautiful silver Emblem, in the possession of the writer.^[8] When the arts of Greece were transplanted into Italy and Sicily, the word Emblema became naturalised in the Latin tongue, though not without some resistance on the part of the reigning prince Tiberius. That emperor is reported by Suetonius,” Tiber. Cæsar Vita, c. 71, “to have found fault with the introduction of the word into a Decree of the Senate, as being of foreign growth. Cicero, however, had used it in his orations against Verres, where he accuses that rapacious governor (amongst other crimes) of having compelled the people of Haluntium to bring to him their vases, from which he carefully abstracted the valuable Emblems and inserted them upon his own golden vessels. Quintilian,” lib. 2, cap. 4, “soon after this period, in enumerating the arts of oratory used by the pleaders of his day, describes some of them as in the habit of preparing and committing to memory certain highly finished clauses, to be inserted (as occasion might arise) like Emblems in the body of their orations.”^[9]

“Such was the meaning of the term in the classical ages of Greece and Rome; nor was its signification altered until some time after the revival of literature in the fifteenth century.”

Our own Geoffrey Whitney, deriving, as he does the other parts of his Choice of Emblemes from the writers on the subject that preceded him, gives very exactly the same explanation as Mr. Yates. In his address “To the Reader” (p. 2) he says;—“It resteth now to shewe breeflie what this worde Embleme signifieth, and whereof it commeth, which thoughe it be borrowed of others, & not proper in the Englishe tonge, yet that which it signifieth: Is, and hathe bin alwaies in vse amongst vs, which worde being in Greek ἐμβάλλεσθαι, vel ἐπεμβλῆσθαι is as muche to saye in Englishe as To set in, or to put in: properlie ment by suche figures, or workes; as are wroughte in plate, or in stones in the pauementes, or on the waules, or suche like, for the adorning of the place: hauinge some wittie deuise expressed with cunning woorkemanship, somethinge obscure to be perceiued at the first, whereby, when with further consideration it is vnderstood, it maie the greater delighte the behoulder. And althoughe the worde dothe comprehende manie thinges, and diuers matters maie be therein contained; yet all Emblemes for the most parte, maie be reduced into these three kindes, which is Historicall, Naturall, & Morall. Historicall, as representing the actes of some noble persons, being matter of historie. Naturall, as in expressing the natures of creatures, for example, the loue of the yonge Storkes, to the oulde, or of suche like. Morall, pertaining to vertue and instruction of life, which is the chiefe of the three, and the other two maye bee in some sorte drawen into this head. For, all doe tende vnto discipline, and morall preceptes of liuing. I mighte write more at large hereof, and of the difference of Emblema, Symbolum, & Ænigma, hauinge all (as it weare) some affinitie one with the other. But bicause my meaning is to write as briefely as I maie, for the auoiding of tediousnes, I referre them that would further inquire therof, to And. Alciatus, Guiliel. Perrerius, Achilles Bocchius & to diuers others that haue written thereof, wel knowne to the learned. For I purpose at this present, to write onelie of this worde Embleme: Bicause it chieflie doth pertaine vnto the matter I haue in hande, whereof I hope this muche, shall giue them some taste that weare ignoraunt of the same.”

Whitney’s namesake, to whom flattering friendship compared him, Geoffrey Chaucer, gives us more than the touch of an Emblem, when he describes, in the Canterbury Tales, l. 159–63, the dress of “a Nonne, a Prioresse,”—

“Of smale corall aboute hire arm she bare

A pair of bedes, gauded all with grene;

And theron heng a broche of gold ful shene,

On whiche was first ywritten a crouned A,

And after, Amor vincit omnia.”^[10]

So the “Cristofre,” which the Yeoman wore, l. 115,

“A Cristofre on his brest of silver shene,”

was doubtless a true Emblem, to be put on, and taken off, as occasion served,—and was probably a cross with the image of Christ upon it: and if pictured forth according to the description in The Legend of Good Women, l. 1196–8, an emblematical device was exhibited, where

“With saddle redde, embrouded with delite

Of gold the barres, up enbossed high,

Sate Dido, all in gold and perrie wrigh.”

This form, the natural form of the Emblem, we may illustrate from a Greek coin, figured in Eschenburg’s Manual of Classical Literature, by Fisk, ed. 1844, pl. xl. p. 351.

The Flying Horse and other ornaments of this coin on the helmet of Minerva are Emblems,—and so are the owl, the olive wreath, and the amphora, or two-handled vase. Were these independent castings or mouldings, to be put on or taken off, they would be veritable emblems in the strict literal sense of the word.

Spenser’s ideas of devices and ornaments correspond to this meaning. Mercilla, the allegorical representation of the sovereign Elizabeth, is described as

“that gratious Queene:

Who sate on high, that she might all men see

And might of all men royally be seene,

Upon a throne of gold full bright and sheene,

Adorned all with gemmes of endless price,

As either might for wealth have gotten beene,

Or could be fram’d by workman’s rare device

And all embost with lyons and with flour de lice.”

Faerie Queene, v. 9. 27.

In Cymbeline, Shakespeare represents Iachimo, act i. sc. 6, l. 188, 9, describing “a present for the emperor;”

“Tis plate, of rare device; and jewels

Of rich and exquisite form; their values great.”

So Spenser, Faerie Queene, iv. 4. 15, sets forth, “a precious rebeke in an arke of gold,” as

“A gorgeous Girdle, curiously embost

With pearle and precious stone, worth many a marke;

Yet did the workmanship farre passe the cost.”

In the literal use of the word emblem Shakespeare is very exact. Parolles, All’s Well, act ii. sc. 1, l. 40, charges the young lords of the French court, as

“Noble heroes, my sword and yours are kin;” and adds, “Good sparks and lustrous, a word, good metals: you shall find in the regiment of the Spinii one Captain Spurio, with his cicatrice, an emblem of war, here on his sinister cheek; it was this very sword entrenched it.”

The Coronation Scene in Henry VIII., act iv. sc. 1. l. 81–92, describes the solemnities, when Anne Bullen, “the goodliest woman that ever lay by man,

“with modest paces

Came to the altar; where she kneel’d, and saint-like

Cast her fair eyes to heaven, and pray’d devoutly:”

Each sacred rite is then observed towards her;—

“She had all the royal makings of a queen;

As holy oil, Edward Confessor’s crown,

The rod, and bird of peace, and all such emblems

Lay’d nobly on her.”

And down to Milton’s time the original meaning of the word Emblem was still retained, though widely departed from as used by some of the Emblem writers. Thus he pictures the “blissful bower” of Eden, bk. iv. l. 697–703, Paradise Lost,

“each beauteous flower,

Iris all hues, roses, and jessamin,

Rear’d high their flourish’d heads between, and wrought

Mosaic: underfoot the violet,

Crocus, and hyacinth, with rich inlay

Broider’d the ground, more colour’d than with stone

Of costliest emblem.”

Thus, in their origin, Emblems were the figures or ornaments fashioned by the tools of the artists, in metal or wood, independent of the vase, or the column, or the furniture, they were intended to adorn; they might be affixed or detached at the promptings of the owner’s fancy. Then they were formed, as in mosaic, by placing side by side little blocks of coloured stone, or tiles, or small sections of variegated wood. Raised or carved figures, however produced, came next to be considered as Emblems; and afterwards any kind of figured ornament, or device, whether carved or engraved, or simply traced, on the walls and floors of houses or on vessels of wood, clay, stone, or metal. These ornaments were sometimes like the raised work on the Warwick and other vases, and formed a crust which made a part of the vessel which they embellished; but at other times they were devices, drawings and carvings on a framework which might be detached from the cup or goblet on which the owner had placed them, and be applied to other uses.^[11]

We may here remark, since embossed ornaments and sculptured figures on any plain surface are essentially Emblems, the sculptor, the engraver, the statuary and the architect, indeed all workers in wood, metal, or stone, who embellish with device or symbol the simplicity of nature’s materials, are especially entitled to take rank in the fraternity of the Emblematists. They and their patrons, the whole world of the civilized and the intellectual, are not content with the beam out of the forest, or with the marble from the quarry, or with even the gold from the mine. In themselves cedar, marble and gold are only forms of brute and unintelligent nature,—and therefore we impose upon them signs of deep-seated thoughts of the heart and devices of wondrous meaning, and out of the rocks call forth sermons, and lessons and parables, and highly spiritual suggestions. On the very shrines of God we place our images of corruptible things,—but then the soul that rightly reads the images lifts them out of their corruptibility and makes them the teachers of eternal truths.

The domains of the statuary and of the architect are however too vast to be entered upon by us, except with a passing glance; they are like Philosophy; it is all Natural,—and yet wisely men map it out into kingdoms and divisions, and pursue each his selected work.

So we remember it is not the Universe of Emblematism we must attempt, even though Shakespeare should lend us

“The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

To glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown,”

should add the gift of “the poet’s pen,” so that we might

“Turn them to shapes, and give to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.”

Midsummer Night’s Dream, act v. sc. 1. l. 12–17.

Our business is only with that comparatively small section of the Emblem-World, which, “like mummies in their cerements,” is wrapped up within the covers of the so called Emblem-books. Whether, when they are unrolled, they are worth the search and the labour, some may doubt;—but perchance a scarabæus, or an emerald, with an ancient harp upon it, may reward our patience.

By a very easy and natural step, figures and ornaments of many kinds, when placed on smooth surfaces, were named emblems; and as these figures and ornaments were very often symbolical, i. e., signs, or tokens of a thought, a sentiment, a saying, or an event, the term emblem was applied to any painting, drawing, or print that was representative of an action, of a quality of the mind, or of any peculiarity or attribute of character.^[12] “Emblems in fact were, and are, a species of hieroglyphics, in which the figures or pictures, besides denoting the natural objects to which they bear resemblances, were employed to express properties of the mind, virtues and abstract ideas, and all the operations of the soul.”

Tabula Cebetis philosophi so=

cratici-cũ Iohãnis Aeſticãpiani Epiſtola.

Fab. Cebetis, 1507.

Plate 1^a

Tableau of Human Life from Cebes B C 390

Thus, the Tablet of Cebes, a work by one of the disciples of Socrates, about B.C. 390, is an explanation, in the form of a Dialogue, of a picture, said to have been set up in the temple of Kronos at Athens or at Thebes, and which was declared to be emblematical of Human Life.

One of the older Latin versions, printed in 1507, presents the foregoing illustrative frontispiece.

As the book has come down to modern times it is, generally, what has sometimes been named, nudum Emblema, a naked Emblem, because it has neither device nor artistic drawing, but, like Shakespeare’s comparison of all the world to a stage in which man plays many parts, the course of Life, with its discipline, false hopes and false pleasures, is in the Tablet so described,—in fact so delineated,^[13] as to have enabled the Dutch designer and engraver, Romyn de Hooghe, in 1670, to have pictured “the whole story of Human Life as narrated to the Grecian sage.”

The Moral of the Allegory may not be set forth with entire clearness in the picture, but it can be given in the words of one of the Golden Sentences of Democritus,—see Gale’s Opus. Mythol.:—

“That human happiness does not result from bodily excellencies nor from riches, but is founded on uprightness of mind and on righteousness of conduct.”

Coins and medals furnish most valuable examples of emblematical figures; indeed some of the Emblem writers, as Sambucus in 1564, were among the earliest to publish impressions or engravings of ancient Roman money, on which are frequently given very interesting representations of customs and symbolical acts. On Grecian coins, which Priestley, in his Lectures on History, vol. i. p. 126,—highly praises for “a design, an attitude, a force, and a delicacy, in the expression even of the muscles and veins of human figures,”—we find, to use heraldic language, that the owl is the crest of Athens,—a wolf’s head, that of Argos,—and a tortoise the badge of the Peloponnesus. The whole history of Louis XIV. and that of his great adversary, William III., are represented in volumes containing the medals that were struck to commemorate the leading events of their reigns, and though outrageously untrue to nature and reality by the adoption of Roman costumes and classic symbols, they serve as records of remarkable occurrences.

Heraldry throughout employs the language of Emblems;—it is the picture-history of families, of tribes and of nations, of princes and emperors. Many a legend and many a strange fancy may be mixed up with it and demand almost the credulity of simplest childhood in order to obtain our credence; yet in the literature of Chivalry and Honours there are enshrined abundant records of the glory that belonged to mighty names. I recall now but one instance. In the fine folio lately emblazoned with the well-known motto “GANG FORWARD,” “I AM READY,” what volumes, to those who can interpret each mark and sign and tutored symbol, are wrapped up in the Examples of the ornamental Heraldry of the sixteenth Century: London, 1867, 1868.

The custom of taking a device or badge, if not a motto, is traced by Paolo Giovio, in his Dialogo dell’ Imprese militari et amorose, ed. 1574, p. 9,^[14] to the earliest times of history. He writes,

“To bear these emblems was an ancient usage.” Gio. “It is a point not to be doubted, that the ancients used to bear crests and ornaments on the helmets and on the shields: for we see this clearly in Virgil, when he made the catalogue of the nations which came in favour of Turnus against the Trojans, in the eighth book of the Æneid; Amphiaraus then (as Pindar says) at the war of Thebes bore a dragon on his shield. Similarly Statius writes of Capaneus and of Polinices, that the one bore the Hydra, and the other the Sphynx,” &c.

But these were simple emblems, without motto inscribed. The same Paolo Giovio, and other writers after him,^[15] assign both “picture and short posie,” to two of the early Emperors of Rome.

“Augustus, wishing to show how self-governed and moderate he was in all his affairs, never rash and hasty to believe the first reports and informations of his servants, caused to be struck, among several others, on a gold medal of his own, a Butterfly and a Crab, signifying quickness by the Butterfly, and by the Crab slowness, the two things which constitute a temperament necessary for a Prince.”

The motto, as figured below,—“Make haste leisurely.”

AVGVSTE.

Symeon, Dev. Her. 1561.

The Device is thus applied in Whitney’s Emblems, p. 121, and dedicated to two eminent judges of Elizabeth’s reign;

“This figure, lo, Avgvstvs did deuise,

A mirror good, for Iudges iuste to see,

And alwayes fitte, to bee before their eies,

When sentence they, of life, and deathe decree:

Then muste they haste, but verie slowe awaie,

Like butterflie, whome creepinge crabbe dothe staie.”

“The Prince, or Iudge, maie not with lighte reporte,

In doubtfull thinges, giue iudgement touching life:

But trie, and learne the truthe in euerie sorte,

And mercie ioyne, with iustice bloodie knife:

This pleased well Avgvstvs noble grace,

And Iudges all, within this tracke shoulde trace.”

Symeoni.

The other is the device which the Aldi, celebrated printers of Venice, from A.D. 1490 to 1563, assumed, of the dolphin and anchor, but which Titus, son of Vespasian, had long before adopted, with the motto “Propera tarde,”^[16] Hasten slowly: “facendo,” says Symeoni, “vna figura moderata della velocità di questo, e della grauezza di quell’ altra, nel modo che noi veggiamo dinanzi à i libri d’ Aldo.”

But the heraldry of mankind is a boundless theme, and we might by simple beat of drum heraldic collect almost a countless host of crests, badges, and quarterings truly emblematical, and adopted and intended to point out peculiarities or remarkable events and fancies in the histories of the coat-armour families of the world.

The emblematism of bodily sign or action constitutes the language of the dumb. An amusing instance occurs in the Abbé Blanchet’s “Apologues Orientaux,” in his description of “The Silent Academy, or the Emblems:”—

“There was at Hamadan, a city of Persia, a celebrated academy, of which the first statute was conceived in these terms; The academicians shall think much, write little, and speak the very least that is possible. It was named the silent Academy; and there was not in Persia any truly learned man who had not the ambition of being admitted to it. Dr. Zeb, an imaginary person, author of an excellent little work, The Gag, learned, in the retirement of the province where he was born, there was one place vacant in the silent Academy. He sets out immediately; he arrives at Hamadan, and presenting himself at the door of the hall where the academicians are assembled, he prays the servant to give this billet to the president: Dr. Zeb asks humbly the vacant place. The servant immediately executed the commission, but the Doctor and his billet arrived too late,—the place was already filled.

“The Academy was deeply grieved at this disappointment; it had admitted, a little against its wish, a wit from the court, whose lively light eloquence formed the admiration of all ruelles.^[17] The Academy saw itself reduced to refuse Doctor Zeb, the scourge of praters, with a head so well formed and so well furnished! The president, charged to announce to the Doctor the disagreeable news, could scarcely bring himself to it, and knew not how to do it. After having thought a little, he filled a large cup with water, but so well filled it, that one drop more would have made the liquid overflow; then he made sign that the candidate should be introduced. He appeared with that simple and modest air which almost always announces true merit. The president arose and, without offering a single word, showed, with an appearance of deep sorrow, the emblematic cup, this cup so exactly filled. The Doctor understood that there was no more room in the Academy; but without losing courage, he thought how to make it understood that one supernumerary academician would disarrange nothing. He sees at his feet a roseleaf, he picks it up, he places it gently on the surface of the water, and did it so well that not a single drop escaped.

“At this ingenious answer everybody clapped hands; the rules were allowed to sleep for this day, and Doctor Zeb was received by acclamation. The register of the Academy was immediately presented to him, where the new members must inscribe themselves. He then inscribed himself in it; and there remained for him no more than to pronounce, according to custom, a phrase of thanks. But as a truly silent academician, Doctor Zeb returned thanks without saying a word. He wrote in the margin the number 100,—it was that of his new brethren; then, by putting a 0 before the figures, 0100, he wrote below, they are worth neither less nor more. The president answered the modest Doctor with as much politeness as presence of mind. He placed the figure 1 before the number 100, i.e. 1100; and he wrote, they will be worth eleven times more.”

The varieties in the Emblems which exist might be pursued from “the bird, the mouse, the frog, and the four arrows,” which, the Father of history tells us,^[18] the Scythians sent to Darius, the invader of their country,—through all the ingenious devices by which the initiated in secret societies, whether political, social, or religious, seek to guard their mysteries from general knowledge and observation,—until we come to the flower-language of the affections, and learn to read, as Hindoo and Persian maidens can, the telegrams of buds and blossoms,^[19] and to interpret the flashing of colours, either simple or combined. We should have to name the Picture writing of the Mexicans, and to declare what meanings lie concealed in the signs and imagery which adorn tomb and monument,—or peradventure to set forth the art by which, on so simple a material as the bark of a birch-tree, some Indians, on their journey, emblematized a troop with attendants that had lost their way. “In the party there was a military officer, a person whom the Indians understood to be an attorney, and a mineralogist; eight were armed: when they halted they made three encampments.” With their knives the Indians traced these particulars on the bark by means of certain signs, or, rather, hieroglyphical marks;—“a man with a sword,” they fashioned “for the officer; another with a book for the lawyer, and a third with a hammer for the mineralogist; three ascending columns of smoke denoted the three encampments, and eight muskets the number of armed men.” So, without paper or print, a not unintelligible memorial was left of the company that were travelling together.

And so we come to the very Early Examples—if not the earliest—of Emblematical Representation, as exhibited in fictile remains, in the workmanship of the silversmith, and of those by whom the various metals and precious stones have been wrought and moulded; and especially in the numerous specimens of the skill or of the fancy which the glyptic and other artizans of ancient Egypt have left for modern times.

For the nature of Fictile ornamentation it were sufficient to refer to the recently published Life of Josiah Wedgwood;^[20] but in the antefixæ, or terra cotta ornaments, derived from the old Etruscan civilisation, we possess true and literal Emblems. As the name implies, these ornaments “were fixed before the buildings,” often on the friezes “which they adorned,” and were fastened to them by leaden nails. For examples, easy of access, we refer to the sketches supplied by James Yates, Esq., of Highgate; to the Dictionary of Gk. and Rom. Antiquities, p. 51; and especially to that antefixa which represents Minerva superintending the construction of the ship Argo. The man with the hammer and chisel is Argus, who built the vessel under her direction. The pilot Tiphys is assisted by her in attaching the sail to the yard. The borders at the top and bottom are in the Greek style, and are extremely elegant.”

And the pressing of clay into a matrix or mould, from which the form is taken, appears to be of very ancient date. The book of Job xxxviii. 14, alludes to the practice in the words, “it is turned as clay to the seal.” Of similar or of higher antiquity is “the work of an engraver in stone, like the engravings of a signet,” Exodus xxviii. 11. And “the breastplate of judgment, the Urim and the Thummim,” v. 30, worn “upon Aaron’s heart,” was probably a similar emblematical ornament to that which Diodorus Siculus, in his History, bk. i. chap. 75, tells us was put on by the president of the Egyptian courts of justice: “He bore about his neck a golden chain, at which hung an image, set about, or composed of precious stones, which was called Truth.”^[21]

Among instances of emblematical workmanship by the silversmith and his confabricators of similar crafts, we may name that shield of Achilles which Homer so graphically describes,^[22] “solid and large,” “decorated with numerous figures of most skilful art;”—or the shields of Hercules and of Æneas, with which Hesiod, Eoeæ, iv. 141–317, and Virgil, Æneid, viii. 615–73, might make us familiar. Or to come to modern times,—to days our very own,—there is the still more precious, the matchless shield by Vehm, whereon, in most expressive imagery, are hammered out the discoveries of Newton, Milton’s noble epics, and Shakespeare’s dramatic wonders. We may, too, in passing, allude to the richly-embossed and ornamented cups for which our swift racers and grey-hounds, and those “dogs of war,” our volunteers, contend; and the almost imperial pieces of plate, such as the Cæsars never beheld, in which genius and the highest art combine, by their “cunning work,” to carve the deeds and enhance the renown of some of our great Indian administrators and illustrious generals; these all, truly “choice emblemes,” intimate the extent to which our subject might lead. But I forbear to pursue it, though scarcely any path offers greater temptations for wandering abroad amid the marvels of human skill, and for considering reverently and gladly how men have been “filled with the spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship.” Exodus xxxi. 3.

Of glyptic art the most ancient, as well as the most ample, remains are found in the temples and the other monuments of Egypt. Various modern explorers and writers have given very elaborate accounts of those remains, and still are carrying on their researches; but of old writers only Clemens, of Alexandria, who flourished “towards the end of the second century after Christ,” “has left us a full and correct account of the principle of the Egyptian writing,”^[23] and has declared what the subjects were which were included in the word hieroglyphics;^[24] and as far as is known, no other early author, except Horapollo of the Nile, has written expressly on the Hieroglyphics of Egypt, and declared that his work—which was probably translated into Greek in the reign of the emperor Zeno, or even later—was derived from Egyptian sources; indeed, was a book in the language of Egypt.

Probably the best account we have of the author and of the translator, is given by Alexander Turner Cory, in the Preface to his edition of Horapollo. He says, pp. viii. and ix.,—

“At the beginning of the fifth century, Horapollo, a scribe of the Egyptian race, and a native of Phœnebythis, attempted to collect and perpetuate in the volume before us, the then remaining, but fast fading knowledge of the symbols inscribed upon the monuments, which attested the ancient grandeur of his country. This compilation was originally made in the Egyptian language; but a translation of it into Greek by Philip has alone come down to us, and in a condition very far from satisfactory. From the internal evidence of the work, we should judge Philip to have lived a century or two later than Horapollo; and at a time when every remnant of actual knowledge of the subject must have vanished.”

However this may be, it is certainly a book of Emblems, and just previous to Shakespeare’s age, and during its continuance was regarded as a high authority. Within that time there were at least five editions of the work,—and it was certainly the mine in which the writers of Emblem books generally sought for what were to them valuable suggestions. The edition we have used is the small octavo of 1551,^[25] with many woodcuts, imaginative indeed, but designed in accordance with the original text. J. Mercier, a distinguished scholar, who died in 1562, was the editor. In 1547 he was professor of Hebrew at the Royal College of Paris, and in 1548 edited the quarto edition of Horapollo’s Hieroglyphics.

Horapollo, 1551.

From the edition of 1551, p. 52, we take a very popular illustration; it is the Phœnix, and may serve to show the nature of Horapollo’s work.

“How,” he asks, “do the Egyptians represent a soul passing a long time here?” “They paint a bird—the Phœnix; for of all creatures in the world this bird has by far the longest life.”

Again, bk. i. 37, or p. 53, “How do they denote the man who after long absence will return to his friends from abroad?” By the Phœnix; “for this bird, after five hundred years, when the death hour is about to seize it, returns to Egypt, and in Egypt, paying the debt of nature, is burned with great solemnity. And whatever sacred rites the Egyptians observe towards their other sacred animals, these they observe towards the Phœnix.”

And bk. ii. 57,—“The lasting restoration which shall take place after long ages, when they wish to signify it, they paint the bird Phœnix. For when it is born this bird obtains the restoration of its properties. And its birth is in this manner: the Phœnix being about to die, dashes itself upon the ground, and receiving a wound, ichor flows from it, and through the opening another Phœnix is born. And when its wings are fledged, this other sets out with its father to the city of the Sun in Egypt, and on arriving there, at the rising of the Sun, the parent dies; and after the death of the father, the young one sets out again for its own country. And the dead Phœnix do the priests of Egypt bury.”

But the drawings, which in the old editions of Horapollo were fancy-made, have, through the researches of a succession of Egyptian antiquaries, assumed reality, and may be appealed to for proof that Horapollo described the very things which he had seen, though occasionally he, or his translator Philip, attributes to them an imaginative or highly mythical meaning. The results of those researches we witness in the editions of Horapollo, first by the celebrated Dr. Conrad Leemans, of Leyden, in 1835,^[26] and second, by Alexander Turner Cory, Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 1840;^[27] both of which editions, by their illustrative plates, taken from correct drawings of the originals, present Horapollo with an accuracy that could not have been approached in the sixteenth century. We have indeed of that age the great work of Pierius Valerian (ed. folio, Bâle, 1556, leaves 449), the Hieroglyphica, dedicated to Cosmo de’ Medici, with almost innumerable emblems, in fifty-eight books, and with about 365 devices. But it cannot be regarded as an exposition of the Egyptian art, and labours under the same defect as the early editions of Horapollo,—the illustrations are not taken from existing monuments.

An example or two from Leemans and Cory will supply sufficient information to enable the reader to understand something of the nature of Horapollo’s work, and of the actual Hieroglyphics from which that work has in great part been verified.

Leemans’ Horapollo, 1835.

The following is the 31st figure in the plates which Leemans gives; it is the pictorial representation to explain “What the Egyptians mean when they engrave or paint a star.”^[28] “Would they signify the God who sets in order the world, or destiny, or the number five, they paint a star; God, indeed, because the providence of God, to which the motion of the stars and of all the world is subject, determines the victory; for it seems to them that, apart from God, nothing whatever could endure; and destiny they signify, since this also is regulated by stellar management,—and the number five, because out of the multitude which is in heaven, five only, by motion originating from themselves, make perfect the management of the world.”

Of the three figures which are delineated above, the one to the left hand symbolizes God, that in the middle destiny, and the third, the number 5, from five rays being used to indicate a star.

The same subjects are thus represented in Cory’s Horapollo.

Cory’s Horapollo, 1840.

Cory’s Horapollo, bk. i. c. 8, p. 15, also illustrates the question, “How do they indicate the soul?” by the accompanying symbols; of which I. represents the mummy and the departing soul, II. the hawk found sitting on the mummy, and III. the external mummy case. The answer to the question is:—

“Moreover, the Hawk is put for the soul, from the signification of its name; for among the Egyptians the hawk is called Baieth: and this name in decomposition signifies soul and heart; for the word Bai is the soul, and ETH the heart: and the heart according to the Egyptians is the shrine of the soul; so that in its composition the name signifies ‘soul enshrined in heart.’ Whence also the hawk, from its correspondence with the soul, never drinks water, but blood, by which, also, the soul is sustained.”

And in a similar way many of the sacred engravings or drawings are interpreted. A serpent with its tail covered by the rest of its body, “depicts Eternity;”^[29] “to denote an only begotten, or generation, or a father, or the world, or a man, they delineate a SCARABÆUS;”^[30] a Lion symbolises intrepidity,—its FOREPARTS, strength, and its HEAD, watchfulness;^[31] the Stork denotes filial affection, the Crane on the watch, a man on guard against his enemies, and the FEATHER of an Ostrich, impartial justice,—for, adds the author, “this animal, beyond other animals, has the wing feathers equal on every side.”^[32]

Christian Art, like the Religious Art of the world in general,—from the thou and thee of simplest Quakerism, outward and audible sounds of an inward and silent spirit, up to the profoundest mystic ritualism of the Buddhist,—Christian Art abounds in Emblems; gems and colours, genuflexions and other bodily postures supply them; they are gathered from the mineral, animal, and vegetable kingdoms, and besides are enriched from the whole domain of imaginary devices and creatures. Does the emerald flash in its mild lustre?—it is of “victory and hope, of immortality, of faith, and of reciprocal love,” that it gives forth light. Is blue, the colour of heaven, worn in some religious ceremony?—it betokens “piety, sincerity, godliness, contemplation, expectation, love of heavenly things.” Do Christian men bare the head in worship?—it is out of reverence for the living God, whose earthly temples they have entered. The badge of St. John the Baptist, is a lamb on a book,—that of St. John the Evangelist is a cup of gold with a serpent issuing from it. The Pomegranate, “showing its fulness of seed and now bursting,” typifies the hope of immortality;—and a Fleur-de-lys, or the Rose of Sharon, embroidered or painted on a robe,—it marks the Blessed Virgin. With more intricate symbolism the Greek Church represents the Saviour’s name ΙHϹΟΥϹ ΧΡΙϹΤΟϹ.—IesuS CHristuS. The first finger of the hand extended is for I, the second bent for C or s, the thumb crossed upon the third finger for Χ or Ch, and the fourth finger curved for Ϲ or s. Thus are given the initial and final letters of that Holy Name, the Saviour, the Christ.^[33]

Of early Emblems examples enough have now been given to indicate their nature. Whether in closing this part of the subject we should name a work of more ancient date even than the Greek version of Horapollo would admit of doubt, were it not that every work partakes of an emblematical character, when the descriptions given or the instances taken pertain, as

Whitney says, “to vertue and instruction of life,” or “doe tende vnto discipline, and morall preceptes of living.”

Under this rule we hesitate not to admit into the wide category of Emblem writers, Epiphanius, who was chosen bishop of Constantia in Cyprus, A.D. 367, and who died in 402. His Physiologist, published with his sermon on the Feast of Palms, is, like many writings of the Fathers, remarkable for highly allegorical interpretations. An edition, by Ponce de Leon, a Spaniard of Seville, was printed at Rome in 1587, and repeated at Antwerp^[34] in 1588. It relates to the real and imaginary qualities of animals, and to certain precepts and doctrines of which those qualities are supposed to be symbolical. As an example we give here an extract from chapter XXV. p. 106, “Concerning the Stork.”

Epiphanius, 1588.

The Stork is described as a bird of extreme purity; and as nourishing, with wonderful affection, father and mother in their old age. The “interpretation” or application of the fact is;—“So also it behoves us to observe these two divine commands, that is to turn aside from evil and to do good, as the kingly prophet wrote; and likewise in the decalogue the Lord commands, thus saying;—Honour thy father and thy mother.”

In a similar way the properties and habits of various animals,—of the lion, the elephant, the stag, the eagle, the pelican, the partridge, the peacock, &c., are adduced to enforce or symbolize virtues of the heart and life, and to set forth the doctrines of the writer’s creed.

To illustrate the Emblem side of Christian Art a great variety of information exists in Sketches of the History of Christian Art, by Lord Lindsay (3 vols. 8vo: Murray, London, 1847); and Northcote and Brownlow’s Roma Sotterranea, compiled from De Rossi (8vo: Longmans, London, 1869) promises to supply many a symbol and type of a remote age fully to set forth the same subject.

Giovio, 1556.

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CHAPTER II. SKETCH OF EMBLEM-BOOK LITERATURE PREVIOUS TO A.D. 1616. — Section I. EXTENT OF THE EMBLEM LITERATURE TO WHICH SHAKESPEARE MIGHT HAVE HAD ACCESS. — Section II. EMBLEM WORKS AND EDITIONS DOWN TO THE END OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. — Section III. OTHER EMBLEM WORKS AND EDITIONS BETWEEN A.D. 1500 AND 1564. — — — — Section IV. EMBLEM WORKS AND EDITIONS BETWEEN A.D. 1564 AND A.D. 1616. — —

IN the use of the word Emblem there is seldom a strict adherence observed to an exact definition,—so, when Emblem Literature is spoken of, considerable latitude is taken and allowed as to the kind of works which the terms shall embrace. In one sense every book which has a picture set in it, or on it, is an emblem-book,—the diagrams in a mathematical treatise or in an exposition of science, inasmuch as they may be, and often are, detached from the text, are emblems; and when to Tennyson’s exquisite poem of “Elaine,” Gustave Doré conjoins those wonderful drawings which are themselves poetic, he gives us a book of emblems;—Tennyson is the one artist that out of the gold of his own soul fashioned a vase incorruptible,—and Doré is that second artist who placed about it ornaments of beauty, fashioned also out of the riches of his mind.

Yet by universal consent, these and countless other works, scientific, historical, poetic, and religious, which artistic skill has embellished, are never regarded as emblematical in their character. The “picture and short posie, expressing some particular conceit,” seem almost essential for bringing any work within the province of the Emblem Literature;—but the practical application of the test is conceived in a very liberal spirit, so that while the small fish sail through, the shark and the sea-dog rend the meshes to tatters.

A proverb or witty saying, as, in Don Sebastian Orozco’s “Emblemas Morales” (Madrid 1610), “Divesqve miserqve,” both rich and wretched, may be pictured by king Midas at the table where everything is turned to gold, and may be set forth in an eight-lined stanza, to declare how the master of millions was famishing though surrounded by abundance;—and these things constitute the Emblem. Some scene from Bible History shall be taken, as, in “Les figures du vieil Testament, & du nouuel” (at Paris, about 1503), Moses at the burning bush; where are printed, as if an Emblem text, the passage from Exodus iii. 2–4, and by its side the portraits of David and Esaias; across the page is a triplet woodcut, representing Moses at the bush, and Mary in the stable at Bethlehem with Christ in the manger-cradle; various scrolls with sentences from the Scriptures adorn the page:—such representations claim a place in the Emblem Literature. Boissard’s Theatrum Vitæ Humanæ (Metz, 1596) shall mingle, in curious continuity, the Creation and Fall of Man, Ninus king of the Assyrians, Pandora and Prometheus, the Gods of Egypt, the Death of Seneca, Naboth and Jezabel, the Advent of Christ and the Last Judgment;—yet they are all Emblems,—because each has a “picture and a short posie” setting forth its “conceit.” To be sure there are some pages of Latin prose serving to explain or confuse, as the case may be, each particular imagination; but the text constitutes the emblem, and however long and tedious the comment, it is from the text the composition derives its name.

“Stam und Wapenbuch hochs und niders Standts,”—A stem and armorial Bearings-book of high and of low Station,—printed at Frankfort-on-Mayne, 1579, presents above 270 woodcuts of the badges, shields and helmets, with appropriate symbols and rhymes, belonging as well to the humblest who can claim to be “vom gutem Geschlecht,” of good race, as to the Electoral Princes and to the Cæsarean Majesty of the Holy Roman Empire. Most of the figures are illustrated by Latin and German verses, and again “picture and short posie” vindicate the title,—book of Emblems.

And of the same character is a most artistic work by Theodore de Bry, lately added to the treasure-house at Keir; it is also a Stam und Wapenbuch, issued at Frankfort in 1593, with ninety-four plates all within most beautiful and elaborate borders. Its Latin title, Emblema Nobilitate et Vulgo scitu digna, &c., declares that these Emblems are “worthy to be known both by nobles and commons.”

And so when an Emperor is married, or the funeral rites of a Sovereign Prince celebrated, or a new saint canonized, or perchance some proud cardinal or noble to be glorified, whatever Art can accomplish by symbol and song is devoted to the emblem-book pageantry,—and the graving tool and the printing press accomplish as enduring and wide-spread a splendour as even Titian’s Triumphs of Faith and Fame.

Devotion that seeks wisdom from the skies, and Satire that laughs at follies upon the earth, both have claimed and used emblems as the exponents of their aims and purposes.

Plate 2

Christ’s adoption of the Human Soul Otho Vænius 1615

With what surpassing beauty and nobleness both of expression and of sentiment does Otho Vænius in his “Amoris Divini Emblemata,” Antwerp, 1615, represent to the mind as well as to the eye the blessed Saviour’s adoption of a human soul, and the effulgence of love with which it is filled! (See Plate II.) They are indeed divine Images portrayed for us, and the great word is added from the beloved disciple,—“Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God.” And the simple Refrain follows,—

And that clever imitation of the “Stultifera Nauis,” the Fool-freighted Ship, of the fifteenth century, namely, the “Centifolium Stultorum,” edition 1707, or Hundred-leaved Book of Fools of the eighteenth, proves how the Satirical may symbolize and fraternize with the Emblematical. The title of the book alone is sufficient to show what a vehicle for lashing men’s faults the device with its stanzas and comment may be made; it is, “A hundred-leaved book of Fools, in Quarto; or an hundred exquisite Fools newly warmed up, in Folio,—in an Alapatrit-Pasty for the show-dish; with a hundred fine copper engravings, for honest pleasure and useful pastime, intended as well for frolicsome as for melancholy minds; enriched moreover with a delicate sauce of many Natural Histories, gay Fables, short Discourses, and edifying Moral Lessons.”

Among the one hundred distinguished characters, we might select, were it only in self-condemnation, the Glass and Porcelain dupe, the Antiquity and Coin-hunting dupe, and especially the Book-collecting dupe. These are among the best of the devices, and the stanzas, and the expositions. Dupes of every kind, however, may find their reproof in the six simple German lines,—p. 171,

meaning pretty nearly in our vernacular English,

But Politics also have the bright, if not the dark, side of their nature presented to the world in Emblems. Giulio Capaccio, Venetia, 1620, derives “Il Principe,” The Prince, from the Emblems of Alciatus, “with two hundred and more Political and Moral Admonitions,” “useful,” he declares, “to every gentleman, by reason of its excellent knowledge of the customs, economy, and government of States.” Jacobus à Bruck, of Angermunt, in his “Emblemata Politica,” A.D. 1618, briefly demonstrates those things which concern government; but Don Diego Saavedra Faxardo, who died in 1648, in a work of considerable repute,—“Idea de vn Principe Politico-Christiano, representada en cien Empresas,”—Idea of a Politic-Christian Prince, represented in one hundred Emblems (edition, Valencia, 1655), so accompanies his Model Ruler from the cradle to maturity as almost to make us think, that could we find the bee-bread on which Kings should be nourished, it would be no more difficult a task for a nation to fashion a perfect Emperor than it is for a hive to educate their divine-right ruling Queen.

Plate 3

Creation, Symeoni 1559

But, so great is the variety of subjects to which the illustrations from Emblems are applied, that we shall content ourselves with mentioning one more, taking out the arguments, as they are named, from celebrated classic poets, and converting them into occasions for pictures and short posies. Thus, like the dust of Alexander, the remains of the mighty dead, of Homer and Virgil, of Ovid and Horace, have served the base uses of Emblem-effervescence, and in nearly all the languages of Europe have been forced to misrepresent the noble utterances of Greece and Rome. Many of the pictures, however, are very beautiful, finely conceived, and skilfully executed;—we blame not the artists, but the false taste which must make little bits of verses where the originals existed as mighty poems.

Generally it is considered that the Ovids of the fifteenth century were without pictorial illustrations, and could not, therefore, be classed among books of Emblems; but the Blandford Catalogue, p. 21, records an edition, “Venetia, 1497,” “cum figuris depictis,”—with figures portrayed. Without discussing the point, we will refer to an undoubted emblematized edition of the Metamorphoses of Ovid, “Figurato & abbreviato in forma d’Epigrammi da M. Gabriello Symeoni,”—figured and abbreviated in form of Epigrams by M. Gabriel Symeoni. The volume is a small 4to of 245 pages, of which 187 have each a title and device and Italian stanza, the whole surrounded by a richly figured border. The volume, dedicated to the celebrated “Diana di Poitiers, Dvchessa di Valentinois,” was published “A Lione per Giouanni di Tornes nella via Resina, 1559.” An Example, p. 13, (see Plate III.,) will show the character of the work, of which another edition was issued in 1584. The Italian stanzas are all of eight lines each, and the passages of the original Latin on which they are founded are collected at the end of the volume. Thus, for “La Creatione & confusione del Mondo,” the Latin lines are,

Of the devices several are very closely imitated in the woodcuts of Reusner’s Emblems, published at Frankfort, in 1581. The engravings in Symeoni’s Ovid are the work of Solomon Bernard, “the little Bernard,” a celebrated artist born at Lyons in 1512; who also produced a set of vignettes for a French translation of Virgil, L’Eneide de Virgile, Prince des Poetes latins, printed at Lyons in 1560.

“Qvinti Horatii Flacci Emblemata,” as Otho Vænius names one of his choicest works, first published in 1607, is a similar adaptation of a classic author to the prevailing taste of the age for emblematical representation. The volume is a very fine 4to of 214 pages, of which 103 are plates; and a corresponding 103 contain extracts from Horace and other Latin authors, followed, in the edition of 1612, by stanzas in Spanish, Italian, French and Flemish. An example of the execution of the work will be found as a Photolith, Plate XVII., near the end of our volume; it is the “Volat irrevocabile tempus,”—Irrevocable time is flying,—so full of emblematical meaning.

From the office of the no less celebrated Crispin de Passe, at Utrecht, in 1613, issued, in Latin and French verse, “Specvlvm Heroicvm Principis omnium temporum Poëtarum Homeri,”—The Heroic Mirror of Homer, the Prince of the Poets of all times. The various arguments of the twenty-four books of the Iliad have been taken and made the groundwork of twenty-four Emblems, with their devices most admirably executed. The Latin and French verses beneath each device unmistakeably impress a true emblem-character on the work. The author, “le Sieur J. Hillaire,” appends to the Emblems, pp. 69–75, “Epitaphs on the Heroes who perished in the Trojan War,” and also “La course d’Vlisses, son tragitte retour, & deffaicte des amans qui poursuivoient la chaste & vertueuse Penelope.”

What might not in this way be included within the wide-encompassing grasp of the determined Emblematist it is almost impossible to say; and therefore it ought to be no matter of surprise to find there is practically a greater extent given to the Literature of Emblems than of absolute right belongs to it. We shall not go much astray if we take Custom for our guide, and keep to its decisions as recorded in the chief catalogues of Emblem works.

Horapollo, 1551.

LEAVING for the most part out of view the discussions which have taken place as to the exact time and the veritable originators of the arts of printing by fixed or moveable types, and of the embellishing of books by engravings on blocks of wood or plates of copper, we are yet—for the full development of the condition and extent of the Emblem Literature in the age of Shakespeare—required to notice the growth of that species of ornamental device in books which depends upon Emblems for its force and meaning. We say advisedly “ornamental device in books,” for infinite almost are the applications of Symbol and Emblem to Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting, as is testified by the Remains of Antiquity in all parts of the world, by the Pagan tombs and Christian catacombs of ancient Rome, by nearly every temple and church and stately building in the empires of the earth, and especially in those wonderful creations of human skill in which form and colour bring forth to sight nearly every thought and fancy of our souls.

A strictly emblematical work in English is the following, “from a finely written and illuminated parchment roll, in perfect preservation, about two yards and three quarters in length,” “The Five Wounds of Christ.” “By William Billyng;” “Manchester: Printed by R. and W. Dean, 4to, 1814.” The date is fixed by the editor, William Bateman, “between the years 1400 and 1430;” and the poem contains about 120 lines, with six illuminated devices. We give here, on page 40, in outline, the Device of “The Heart of Jesus the Well of everlasting Lyfe.”

Five wounds of Christ, 1400–1430.

There follows, as to each of the Emblems, a Prayer, or Invocation; the Device in question has these lines,—

An Astronomical Manuscript in the Chetham Library, Manchester, the eclipses in which are calculated from A.D. 1330 to A.D. 1462, contains emblematical devices for the months of the year, and the signs of the zodiac; these are painted medallions at the beginning of each month; and to each of the months is attached a metrical line explanatory of the device.

This manuscript contains, as J. O. Halliwell says of it, “an astrological volvelle—an instrument mentioned by Chaucer: it is the only specimen, I believe, now remaining in which the steel stylus or index has been preserved in its original state.”

Doubtless it is a copy of the Kalendrier des Bergers, which with the Compost des Bergers, has in various forms been circulated in France from the fourteenth century almost, if not quite, to the present day. An edition in 4to, of 144 pages, printed at Troyes, in 1705, bears the title, Le Grand Calendrier et Compost des Bergers; composé par le Berger de la grand Montagne.

Kindred works issued from the presses of Venice, of Nuremberg, and of Augsburg, between 1475 and 1478, in Latin, Italian, and German, and are ascribed to John Muller, more known under the name of Regiomontanus, a celebrated astronomer, born in 1436, at Koningshaven, in Franconia, and who died at Rome in 1476. One of these editions, in folio, was printed at Augsburg in 1476 by Erhard Ratdolt, being the first work he sent forth after his establishment in that city. (See Biog. Univ., vol. xxx. p. 381, and vol. xxxvii. p. 25.) But the most thoroughly emblematical work from Ratdolt’s press was an “Astrolabium planũ in tabulis,” “wrought out anew by John Angeli, master of liberal arts, MCCCCLXXXVIII.” There are 414 woodcuts, and all of them emblematical. The library at Keir contains a perfect copy, 4to, in most admirable condition. Brunet, i. c. 290, names a Venice edition in 1494, and refers to other astronomical works by the same author.

In its manuscript form, too, the celebrated “Speculum Humanæ Salvationis,” Mirror of Human Salvation, exhibits throughout the emblem characteristics. Of this work, both as it exists in manuscript and in the earliest printed form by Koster of Haarlem, about 1430, specimens are given in “A History of the Art of Printing from its invention to its wide spread developement in the middle of the sixteenth century;” “by H. Noel Humphreys,” “with one hundred illustrations produced in Photo-lithography;” folio: Quaritch, London, 1867. Pl. 8 of Humphreys’ learned and magnificent volume exhibits “a page from a manuscript copy of the Speculum Humanæ Salvationis, executed previous to the printed edition attributed to Koster;” and pl. 10, “A page from the Speculum Humanæ Salvationis attributed to Koster of Haarlem, in which the text is printed from moveable types.”

The inspection of these plates, and the assurance by Humphreys, p. 60, that “the illustrations, though inferior to Koster’s woodcuts, are of similar arrangement,” may satisfy us that the Speculum Humanæ Salvationis, and all its kindred works, in German, Dutch, and French, amounting to many editions previous to the year 1500,^[35] are truly books that belong to the Emblem literature. Thus pl. 8, “though without the decorative Gothic framework which separates, and, at the same time, binds together the double illustrations of the xylographic artist,” exhibits to us the exact character of “the double pictures of the Speculum.” “These double pictures,” p. 60 of Humphreys, “illustrate first a passage in the New Testament, and secondly the corresponding subject of the Old, of which it is the antitype. In the present page we have Christ bearing His cross (Christus bajulat crucem) typified by Isaac carrying the wood for his own sacrifice (Isaac portat ligna sua).” “The engravings,” p. 58, “i.e., of Koster’s first great effort, occur at the top of each leaf, and the rest of the page is filled with two columns of text, which, in the supposed first edition, is composed of Latin verse

(or, rather, Latin prose with rhymed terminations to the lines, as the lines do not scan); and in later editions, in Dutch prose.” “This specimen,” pl. 8, p. 60, “will enable the student to understand precisely the kind of manuscript book which Koster reproduced in a cheaper form by xylography, to which he eventually allied the still more important invention of moveable types.”

From a very fine MS. copy of the Speculum Humanæ Salvationis, belonging to Mr. Henry Yates Thompson, our fac-simile Plates IV. and V., though on a smaller scale, present the Title and the first Pair of devices with their text. The work is in twenty-nine chapters, and to each there are four devices in four columns, with appropriate explanations in Latin verse, and at the foot of the columns are the references to the Old or the New Testament.

The manuscript entitled “De Volueribus, sive de tribus Columbis,”—Concerning Birds, or the Three Doves, in the library “du Grand Seminaire,” at Bruges, is also an emblem-book. It is excellently illuminated, and the workmanship is probably of the thirteenth century. (See the Whitney Reprint, p. xxxii.)

Plate 4

Title Page from a M.S.: “Speculum Humanæ Salvationis”

Plate 5

Leaf 31 from a M.S. “Speculum Humanæ Salvationis”

The illuminated Missal,^[36] executed in 1425 for John, Duke of Bedford and regent of France, according to the account published of it by Richard Gough, 4to, London, 1794, and by others, abounds in emblem devices. It contains “fifty-nine large miniatures, which nearly occupy the page, and above a thousand small ones in circles of about an inch and half diameter, displayed in brilliant borders of golden foliage, with variegated flowers, &c. At the bottom of every page are two lines in blue and gold letters, which explain the subject of each miniature.” “The Missal,” says Dibdin, “frequently displays the arms of these noble personages,” (John, Duke of Bedford, and of his wife Jane, daughter of the Duke of Burgundy,) “and also affords a pleasing testimony of the affectionate gallantry of the pair: the motto of the former being ‘A VOUS ENTIER;’ that of the latter, ‘J’EN SUIS CONTENTE.’” Among its ornaments are emblems or symbols of the twelve months, and a large variety of paintings derived from the Sacred Scriptures, many of which possess an emblematical meaning.

Not aiming at any exhaustive method in the information we gather and impart respecting Emblem works and editions previous to the year A.D. 1500, we pass by the very numerous other instances in support of our theme which a search into manuscripts would supply. The “Block-Books,”^[37] which, in the main, are especially emblematical, we next consider. We select two instances as representative of the whole set;—namely, the “Biblia Pauperum,” Bibles of the Poor, and the “Ars Memorandi,” The Art of Remembering.

In his “Bibliographical Decameron,” vol. i. p. 160, Dibdin tells us, “The earliest printed book, containing text and engravings illustrative of scriptural subjects, is called the Histories of Joseph, Daniel, Judith, and Esther. This was executed in the German language, and was printed by Pfister at Bamberg in 1462. It is among the rarest of typographical curiosities in existence.” Dibdin’s dictum is considerably modified, if not set aside, by Noel Humphreys; who, though affirming, p. 41, that “a late German edition of the Biblia Pauperum has the date 1475, but that before that period editions had been printed at the regular press with moveable types, as, for instance, that of Pfister, printed at Bamberg in 1462,”—yet had previously declared, p. 39, “many suppose that Laurens Koster, of Haarlem, who afterwards invented moveable types, was one of the earliest engravers of Block-books, and that in fact the Biblia Pauperum was actually his work.” “The period of its execution may probably be estimated as lying between 1410 and 1420: probably earlier, but certainly not later.”

The earliest editions of these Biblia Pauperum contain forty leaves, the later editions fifty, printed only on one side. Opposite to p. 40, Noel Humphreys gives, pl. 2, “A Page from the Biblia Pauperum generally supposed to be one of the earliest block-books.”

Plate 6

A Page from the “Biblia Pauperum” generally supposed one of the earliest Block Books

Availing ourselves of the Author’s remarks, p. 40, we yet prefer, on account of some inaccuracies in his decyphering the Latin contractions, giving our own description of this plate. The page is in three divisions, all in the Gothic decorative style, with separating archways between the subjects. In the upper division, in the centre, are seated, each in his niche, “Isaya” and “Dauid.” (See Plate VI.) In the upper corners, on the right hand of the first, and on the left hand of the second, are Latin inscriptions,—the former relating to Eve’s seed bruising the serpent’s head, Genesis iii. c., and the latter to Gideon’s fleece saturated with dew, Judges vi. c. The middle compartment is a triptych, consisting of Eve’s Temptation, the Annunciation by the Angel to the Blessed Virgin; and Gideon in his armour, on his knees, with his shield on the ground, watching the fleece. Over Eve’s Temptation there is a scroll issuing from Isaiah’s niche, and having this inscription: “Ecce virgo concipiet et pariet filium,”—Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, Is. vii. 14; Eve stands near the tree of life, emblematized by God the Father among the branches,—and erect before her is the serpent, almost on the tip of its tail, with its body slightly curved. In the Annunciation appears a ray of light breathed upon the Virgin from God the Father seated in the clouds, and in the ray are the dove, the emblem of the Holy Spirit, descending, and an infant Christ bearing his cross; the Angel stands before Mary addressing to her the salutation, “Ave gratiâ plena, dominus tecum,”—Hail full of grace, the Lord is with thee, Luke i. 28; and Mary, seated with a book on her knees, and her hands devoutly crossed on her breast, replies, “Ecce, ancilla domini, fiat mihi,”—Behold, the handmaid of the Lord, be it unto me, Luke i. 38. Of Gideon and the fleece little needs be said, except that over him from the niche of David issues a scroll with the words “Descendet dominus sicut pluvia in vellus,” in the Latin Vulgate, Ps. lxxi. 6, i.e. The Lord shall descend as rain upon the fleece; but in the English version, Ps. lxxii. 6, He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass. The Angel also addressing Gideon bears a scroll, not quite legible, but evidently meaning, “Dominus tecum virorum fortissime,” Judges vi. 12,—English version, The Lord is with thee, thou mighty man of valour. The lower compartment, like the upper, has in the centre two arched niches, which contain, the one Ezekiel, the other Jeremiah; beneath Eve’s temptation and Gideon’s omen are the alliterative and rhyming couplets

and beneath the Annunciation, “Virgo salutatur, Innupta manens gravidatur.”

From Ezekiel’s niche issues the scroll, Ez. xliv. 2, “Porta hæc clausa erit, et non aperietur;” and from Jeremiah’s, xxxi. 22, “Creavit dominus novum super terram, femina circumdabit virum.”

It requires no argument to prove the emblematical nature of the middle compartment of this page from the Biblia Pauperum; and the texts on scrolls are but the accessories to the devices, and serve only the more clearly to mark this Block-book as an Emblem-book.

Plate 7

S. John the Evangelist. 1st edition Block Book from the Corser Collection.

Plate 8

A Page of the Apocalypse from Block Book in the Corser Collection.

Passing by similar Block-books, as The Book of Canticles, and The Apocalypse of St. John, we will conclude the subject with a notice of Humphreys’ pl. 5, following p. 42 of his text; it is “A Subject from the Block-book entitled ‘Ars memorandi,’ executed probably at the beginning of the fifteenth century.”

“The entire work,” we are informed, p. 42, “consists of the symbols of the four evangelists, each occupying a page, and being most grotesquely treated, the bull of St. Luke and the lion of St. Mark standing upright on their hind legs. These symbols are surrounded with various objects, calculated to recall the leading events in their respective Gospels.”

But the whole passage in explanation of the Plate is so much to our purpose, that we ask pardon of the author for inserting it entire. He says:—

“The page I have selected for reproduction is the fourth ‘image or symbol’ of St. Matthew—the Angel. The objects grouped around are many of them very curious, and, without the assistance of the accompanying explanations, would certainly not serve to aid the memory of the modern Biblical students. The symbolic Angel holds in the left hand objects numbered 18, which by the explanation we learn to be the sun and moon, accompanied by an unusual arrangement of stars and planets; intended to recall the passage, ‘there were signs in the sun and moon’—erant signa in sole et luna. I give the text of monkish explanation in MS. No. 19, the clasped hands, represents marriage, in reference to the generations of the Ancestors of Christ as enumerated by St. Matthew. No. 20, the cockle shell and the bunch of grapes are emblems of travelling and pilgrimage, and appear to represent the flight into Egypt; 21, the head of an ass, is intended to recall the entrance of Christ into Jerusalem riding on an ass; 22, a table, with bread-knife and drinking cup, recalls the Last Supper (Cæna magna); and the accompanying symbol, without a number, represents the census rendered to Cæsar.”^[39]

With great kindness Mr. Corser, of Stand, offered me, in the spring of 1868, the use of a very choice Block-book, soon after sold for £415, entitled Historia S. Joan. Euangelist. per Figuras, and which is, I believe, the very copy from which Sotheby’s specimens of the work are taken. Whether it be the “editio princeps,” as a former owner claimed it to be, is doubted on merely conjectural grounds; but a most precious copy it is, internally vindicating its claim to priority. The volume measures 2.82 decimetres by 2.14; or 11 inches by 8.42. There are forty-eight leaves, in perfect preservation, printed on one side. The figures, all coloured, relate either to the traditions and legends of the Evangelist, or to the visions of the Apocalypse, the former being simply pictorial, the latter emblematical.

The two Plates uncoloured (Plate VII. and Plate VIII.) very clearly show the difference between the mere drawing and the device. The pictures of the Evangelist preaching, of Drusiana being baptized, and of the search after John, have no meaning beyond the historical or legendary event;—but the two wings of an eagle given to the woman, of the angel flying with a book above the tree of life, of the dragon persecuting the woman, and of the mother-church passing into the desert: these have a meaning beyond that of the figures delineated;—they are emblematical of hidden truths;—so are all the other plates of this Block-book which represent the visions of the Apocalypse. The date is probably 1420 to 1425.

The Bodleian Library at Oxford is very rich in this particular Block-book, possessing no fewer than three copies of the History of S. John the Evangelist. Among its treasures, however, is a MS. on the same subject, worth them all by reason of its beauty and exquisite finish, which the Block-books certainly do not claim. This MS., on fine vellum and finely drawn and illuminated, is said to have been written in the twelfth century, and to have belonged to Henry II.

But the printing with moveable types is firmly established, and Emblem-books are among its earliest productions. At Bamberg, a city on the Regnitz, near its influx into the Main, the first purely German book was printed in 1461, by the same Pfister who published an edition of the Biblia Pauperum, and who probably learned his art at Mayence with Guttenberg himself. The work in question was a Collection of eighty-five Fables in German, with 101 vignettes cut on wood, each accompanied by a German text of rhyming verses. The first device, says Brunet, vol. i. p. 1096, represents three apes and a tree, and the verses begin with—

The colophon, or subscription, at the end informs us,

The fables were collected by Ulric Boner, a Dominican friar of Bonn, in the thirteenth or at the beginning of the fourteenth century. Their chief value is that they present the most precious remains of the Minnesingers, or German Troubadours, and possess much grace, and “une moralité piquante.” See Biographie Universelle, vol. v. pp. 97, 98: Paris, 1812; and vol. xxxiii. p. 584: Paris, 1823.

Of Æsop’s Fables in Greek, the Milan edition, about A.D. 1480, was the earliest. There had been Latin versions, previously at Rome in 1473, at Bologna and Antwerp in 1486, and elsewhere. The German translation appeared in 1473, the Italian in 1479, the French and the English in 1484, and the Spanish in 1489. Besides these there were at least thirty other editions previous to the year 1500.

It has been doubted if Fables should be classed among the Emblem Literature,—but whether nude, as other emblems have been named when unclothed in the ornaments of wood or copper engravings, or adorned with richly embellished devices, they are, as Whitney would name them, naturally emblematical. Apart from whatever artistic skill can effect for them, they have in themselves meanings to be evolved different from those which the words convey. The Lion, the Fox, and the Ass are not simply names for the veritable animals, but emblems of different characters and qualities among the human race; they symbolize moral sentiments and actions, and when we add the figures of the creatures, though we may make pleasing and significant pictures, we do little for the real development of the emblems.

Books of Fables, however, are so numerous that they and their editors may be counted by hundreds; and as Dibdin intimates, the Bibliomaniac who had gathered up all the editions of Æsop in nearly all the languages of the civilized world, would have formed a very considerable library. Only on a few occasions therefore shall we make mention of books of Fables in our present inquiries.

We shall not however pass unnoticed, since it belongs especially to this period, the “Dyalogus Creaturarum,” or, Dialogues of the Creatures, a collection of Latin Fables, attributed in the fourteenth century to Nicolas Pergaminus, first printed at Gouda in Holland by Gerard Leeu in 1480, and at Stockholm by John Snell in 1483. (See Brunet, vol. ii. p. 674.) A French version, by Colard Mansion, was issued at Lyons in 1482, Dialogue des Creatures moralizie; and an English version, about 1520, by J. Rastall, “Powly’s Churche,” London, namely, “The Dialogue of Creatures moralyzed, of late translated out of latyn in to our English tonge.”

Dyalogus Creat., ed. 1480.

There were various editions and modifications of the work,^[40] but perhaps the contrast between them cannot be better pointed out than by selecting the Fable of the Wolf and the Ass from the Gouda edition of 1480, and also from the Antwerp edition of 1584. The original edition, with the woodcut on the next page in mere outline, tells in simple Latin prose how a wolf and an ass were sawing a log of wood together. From good nature the ass worked up above, the wolf through maliciousness down below, desiring to find an opportunity for devouring the ass; therefore he complained that the ass was sending the sawdust into his eyes. The ass replied, “It is not I who am doing this,—I only guide the saw. If you wish to saw up above I am content,—I will work faithfully down below.” And so they talked on, until the wolf threatening revenge drew back, and the fissure in the beam being suddenly widened, the wedge fell upon the wolf’s head, and the wolf himself was killed.

The Antwerp edition of 1584^[41] changes the simple Latin prose into the elegant Latin elegiacs of John Moerman, and the outline woodcuts of an unknown artist into the copperplate engravings of Gerard de Jode, the eldest of four generations of engravers. The Wolf and the Ass are made to emblematize, “scelesti hominis imago et exitus,”—the image and end of a wicked man. Moerman’s Latin may thus be rendered, from leaf 54, ed. 1584:—

Apologi Creaturarum, 1584.

As in the Blandford Catalogue, it has been usual to count among Emblem-books the “Ecatonphyla,” printed at Venice in 1491. The French translation of 1536 describes the title as, “signifiãt centiesme amour, sciemment appropriees a la dame ayãt en elle autant damour que cent aultres dames en pouroient comprendre,” signifying a hundredth love, knowingly appropriated to the lady having in her as much love as a hundred other ladies could possibly comprehend. (Brunet’s Manuel, i. c. 131, 132.) The author of this work, of which there are several editions, was the celebrated Italian architect, Leoni-Baptista Alberti, born of a noble family of Florence in 1398, and living as some suppose up to 1480. He was a universal scholar, a doctor of laws, a priest, a painter, and a good mechanic.

We are inclined to ask whether Gli Trionfi del Petrarcha, printed at Bologna in 1475,—especially, when as in the Venice editions of 1500 and 1523 they were adorned by the vignettes and wood engravings of Zoan Andrea Veneziano,—whether these “Triumphs of Love, Chastity, and Death” may not, from their highly allegorical character, be included among the Emblem-books of this age?^[42] The same question we might ask respecting “Das Heldenbuch,”—The Book of Heroes,—printed at Augsburg, in 1477, by Gunther Zainer, who had first been a printer at Cracow about 1465; and also concerning the “Libri Cronicarum cũ figuris et imaginibus ab inicio mũdi,” a large folio known as the Chronicles of Nuremberg, which with its 2000 fine wood engravings, attributed to Michael Wohlgemuth, was published in that city in 1493.^[43]

The original “Todtentanz,” or Dance of Death, painted as a memorial of the plague which raged during the Council of Bâle, held between 1431 and 1446 (Bryan, p. 335), certainly was not the work of either of the Holbeins. There are several representations of a Death-dance in the fifteenth century, between 1485 and 1496 (Brunet, v. 873, 874); and there can be little doubt of their emblematical character. The renowned Dance of Death by Hans Holbein the younger we will reserve for its proper place in the next section.

We must not however leave unmentioned The Dance of Macaber, especially as it is presented to us in an English form by John Lydgate, a monk of the Benedictine abbey of Bury St. Edmunds, who was born about 1375, and attained his greatest eminence about 1430. His own power for supplying the materials for an Emblem-device we observe in the lines on “God’s Providence.”

For an account of Lydgate’s Dance of Macaber, and indeed for his version in English, we should do well to consult the remarks by Francis Douce, in Wenceslaus Hollar’s Dance of Death, published about the year 1790, and more particularly the remarks in Douce’s Dissertation, edition 1833.

Plate 9

Title of Brandts Stultifera Navis edition, 1497.

The earliest known edition of La Danse Macabre, originally composed in German, is dated at Paris, 1484, but before the completion of the century there were seven or eight other reprints, some with alterations and others with additions. It was a most popular work, issued at least eight or ten times during the sixteenth century, and still exciting interest.^[44] At p. 39 may be seen copies of some of the devices as used by Verard.

The chief Emblem deviser and writer towards the end of the century was Sebastian Brandt, born at Strasburg in 1458, and after a life of great usefulness and honour dying at Bâle in 1520. The publication in German Iambic verse of his “Narren Schyff,” Bâle, Nuremberg, Rüttlingen, and Augsburg, A.D. 1494, forms quite an epoch in Emblem-book literature. Previous to A.D. 1500, Locher, crowned poet laureate by the Emperor Maximilian I., translated the German into Latin verse, with the title “Stultifera Nauis” (see Plate IX.); Riviere of Poitiers, the Latin into French verse, “La Nef des Folz du Monde;” and Droyn of Amiens, into French prose, “La grãt Nef des Folz du Monde.” Early in the next century, 1504, or even in 1500, there was a Flemish version; and in 1509 two English versions,—one translated out of French, “The Shyppe of Fooles,” by Henry Watson, and printed by “Wynkyn de Worde, MCCCCCIX.” (see Dibdin’s Tour, ii. p. 103); the other,—“Stultifera Nauis,” or “The Shyp of Folys of the Worlde;” “Inprentyd in the Cyte of London, by Richard Pynson, M.D.IX.” (Dibdin’s Typ. Ant. ii. p. 431.) This latter was “translated out of Latin, French, and Duch into Englishe, by Alexander Barclay, Priest;” and reprinted in 1570, during Shakespeare’s childhood by the “Printer to the Queenes Maiestie.” At the same time, 1570, another work by Barclay was published, which, although without devices, partakes of an allegorical or even of an emblematical character; it is The Mirrour of good Maners; “conteining the foure Cardinal Vertues.”

Dibdin, in his Bibliographical Antiquarian, iii. p. 101, mentions “a pretty little volume—‘as fresh as a daisy,’ the Hortulus Rosarum de Valle Lachrymarum, ‘A little Garden of Roses from the Valley of Tears’ (to which a Latin ode by S. Brandt is prefixed), printed by J. de Olpe in 1499,”—but he gives no intimation of its character; conjecturing from its title and from the woodcuts with which it is adorned, it will probably on further inquiry be found to bear an emblematical meaning.

Dibdin also, in the same work, iii. p. 294, names “a German version of the ‘Hortulus Animæ’ of S. Brant,” in manuscript; “undoubtedly,” he says, “among the loveliest books in the Imperial Library.” The Latin edition was printed at Strasburg in 1498, and is ornamented with figures on wood; many of these are mere pictures, without any symbolical meaning,—but it often is the case that the illuminated manuscripts, especially if devotional, and the early printed books of every kind that have pictorial illustrations in them, present various examples of symbolical and emblematical devices.

The last works we shall name of the period antecedent to A.D. 1501, are due to the industry and skill of John Sicile, herald at arms to Alphonso King of Aragon, who died in 1458. Sicile, it seems, prepared two manuscripts, one the Blazonry of Arms,—the other, the Blazonry of Colours. Of the former there was an edition printed at Paris in 1495, Le Blason de toutes Armes et Ecutz, &c.—and of the latter at Lyons early in the sixteenth century, Le Blason des Couleurs en Armes, Liurees et deuises. Within an hundred years, ending with 1595, above sixteen editions of the two works were issued.

Several other authors there are belonging to the period of which we treat,—but enough have been named to show to what an extent Emblem devices and Emblem-books had been adopted, and with what an impetus the invention of moveable types and greater skill in engraving had acted to multiply the departments of the Emblem Literature. It was an impetus which gathered new strength in its course, and which, previous to Shakespeare’s youth and maturity, had made an entrance into almost every European nation. Already in 1500, from Sweden to Italy and from Poland to Spain, the touch was felt which was to awaken nearly every city to the west of Constantinople, to share in the supposed honours of adding to the number of Emblem volumes.

Picta Poesis, 1552.

LABORIOUS in some degree is the enterprise which the title of this Section will indicate before it shall be ended. Perchance we shall have no myths to perplex us, but the demands of sober history are often more inexorable than those flexible boundaries within which the imagination may disport amid facts and fictions.

Better, as I trust, to set this period of sixty-three years before the mind, it may be well to take it in three divisions: 1st, the twenty-one years before Alciatus appeared, to conquer for himself a kingdom, and to reign king of Emblematists for about a century and a half; 2nd, the twenty-one years from the appearance of the first edition of Alciat’s Emblems in 1522 at Milan, until Hans Holbein the younger had introduced the Images and Epigrams of Death, and La Perriere and Corrozet, the one his Theatre of good Contrivances in one hundred Emblems, and the other his Hecatomgraphie, or descriptions of one hundred figures; 3rd, the twenty-one years up to Shakespeare’s birth, distinguished towards its close chiefly by the Italian writers on Imprese, Paolo Giovio, Vincenzo Cartari, Girolamo Ruscelli, and Gabriel Symeoni.

Stulte̦ gustationis scapha.

Badius, 1502.

I.—A Fool-freighted Ship was the title of almost the last book of the fifteenth century,—by a similar title is the Emblem-book called which was launched at the beginning of the sixteenth century; it is, “Jodoci Badii ascēsii Stultifere̦ nauicule̦ seu scaphe̦ Fatuarum mulierum: circa sensus quinq̃ exteriores fraude nauigantium,”—The Fool-freighted little ships of Josse Badius ascensius, or the skiffs of Silly women in delusion sailing about the five outward senses,—“printed by honest John Prusz, a citizen of Strasburg, in the year of Salvation M.CCCCC.II.” There was an earlier edition in 1500,—but almost exactly the same. From that before us we give a specimen of the work, The Skiff of Foolish Tasting. A discourse follows, with quotations from Aulus Gellius, Saint Jerome, Virgil, Ezekiel, Epicurus, Seneca, Horace, and Juvenal; and the discourse is crowned by twenty-four lines of Latin elegiacs, entitled “Celeusma Gustationis fatue̦,”—The Oarsman’s cry for silly Tasting,—thus exhorting—

And so on, until in the concluding stanza Badius declares—

The same work was published in another form, “La nef des folles, selon les cinq sens de nature, composé selon levangile de monseigneur saint Mathieu, des cinq vierges qui ne prindrent point duylle avec eulx pour mectre en leurs lampes:” Paris 4to, about 1501.

Of Badius himself, born in 1462 and dying in 1535, it is to be said that he was a man of very considerable learning, professor of “belles lettres” at Lyons from 1491 to 1511, when he was tempted to settle in Paris. There he established the famous Ascensian Printing Press,—and like Plantin of Antwerp, gave his three daughters in marriage to three very celebrated printers: Michel Vascosan, Robert Etienne, and Jean de Poigny. He was the author of several works besides those that have been mentioned. (Biog. Univ. vol. iii. p. 201.)

Symphorien Champier, Doctor in Theology and Medicine, a native of Lyons, who was physician to Anthony Duke of Lorraine when he accompanied Louis XII. to the Italian war, graduated at Pavia in 1515, and, after laying the foundations of the Lyons College of Physicians, and enjoying the highest honours of his native city, died about 1540. (Aikin’s Biog. ii. 579.) His medical and other works are of little repute, but among them are two or three which may be regarded as imitations of Emblem-books. We will just name,—Balsat’s work with Champier’s additions, La Nef des Princes et des Batailles de Noblesse, &c. (Lyons, 4to goth. with woodcuts, A.D. 1502.); also, La Nef des Dames vertueuses cōposee par Maistre Simphoriē Champier, &c. (Lyons, 4to goth. with woodcuts, A.D. 1503.)

“Bible figures,” too, again have a claim to notice. A very fine copy of “Les figures du vieil Testament, & du nouuel,” which belonged to the Rev. T. Corser, Rector of Stand, near Manchester, supplies the opportunity of noticing that it is decidedly an Emblem work. It is a folio, of 100 leaves, containing forty-one plates, of which one is introductory, and forty are on Scriptural subjects, unarranged in order either of time or place. The work was published in Paris in 1503 by Anthoine Verard, and is certainly, as Brunet declares, ii. c. 1254, “une imitation de l’ouvrage connu sous le nom de Biblia Pauperum.” There are forty sets of figures in triptychs, the wood engravings being very bold and good. Each is preceded or followed by a French stanza of eight lines, declaring the subject; and has appended two or three pages of Exposition, also in French. The Device pages, each in three compartments, are in Latin, and may thus be described. At the top to the left hand, a quotation from the Vulgate appropriate to the pictorial representation beneath it; in the centre two niches, of which David always occupies one, and some writer of the Old Testament the other, a scroll issuing from each niche. The middle compartment is filled by a triptych, the centre subject from the New Testament, the right and left from the Old. At the bottom are Latin verses to the right and left, with two niches in the centre occupied by biblical writers. The Latin verses are rhyming couplets, as on fol. a. iiij, beneath Moses at the burning bush, “Lucet et ignescit, sed non rubus igne calescit,”—It shines and flames, but the bush is not heated by the fire. In triptych, on p. i. rev. are, Enoch’s Translation, Christ’s Ascension, and the Translation of Elijah.

The Aldine press at Venice, A.D. 1505, gave the world the first printed edition of the “Hieroglyphica” of Horapollo. It was in folio, having in the same volume the Fables of Æsop, of Gabrias, &c. See Leemans’ Horapollo, pp. xxix-xxxv. A Latin version by Bernard Trebatius was published at Augsburg in 1515, at Bale in 1518, and at Paris in 1521; and another Latin version by Phil. Phasianinus, at Bologna in 1517. Previous to Shakespeare’s birth there were translations into French in 1543, into Italian in 1548, and into German in 1554,—and down to 1616 sixteen other editions may readily be counted up.

John Haller, who had introduced printing into Cracow in 1500, published in 1507 the first attempt to teach logic by means of a game of cards; it was in Murner’s quarto entitled, “Chartiludium logice̦ seu Logica poetica vel memorativa cum jocundo Pictasmatis Exercimento,”—A Card-game of Logic, or Logic poetical or memorial, with the pleasant Exercise of pictured Representation. It is a curious and ingenious work, and reprints of it appeared at Strasburg in 1509 and 1518; at Paris, by Balesdens, in 1629; and again in 1650, 4to, by Peter Guischet. As an imitation of Brandt’s Ship of Fools, so far as it relates to the follies and caprices of mankind, mention should also be made of Murner’s “Narren Beschwo^erung,”—Exorcism of Fools,—Strasburg, 4to, 1512 and 1518; which certainly at Francfort, in 1620, gave origin to Flitner’s “Nebvlo nebvlonvm,”—or, Rascal of Rascals.

“Speculū Paciētierum theologycis Consolationibus Fratris Ioannis de Tambaco,”—The Mirror of Patience with the theological Consolations of Brother John Tambaco,—Nuremberg, MCCCCCIX., 4to, is a work of much curiousness. On the reverse of the title is an Emblematical device of Job, Job’s wife, and the Devil, followed by exhortations to patience; and on the reverse of the introduction to the second part, also an Emblematical device,—the Queen of Consolation, with her four maidens by her side, and two men kneeling before her. The chapters on consolation are generally in the form of sermonettes, in which the maidens, three or four, or even a dozen, expatiate on different subjects proper for reproof, exhortation, and comfort. The devices in this volume are understood to be from the pencil of Albert Durer.

This same year, 1509, witnessed two English translations, or paraphrases, of Brandt’s “Narren Schif,”—the one The Shyppe of Fooles, taken from the French by Henry Watson, and printed by De Worde;—the other rendered out of Latin, German, and French, The Ship of Fooles, by Alexander Barclay, and printed by Pinson. Of Watson little, if anything, is known, but Barclay is regarded as one of the improvers of the English tongue, and to him it is chiefly owing that a true Emblem-book was made popular in England.

Of the “Dyalogus Creaturarum,” written in the fourteenth century by Nicolas Pergaminus, and printed by Gerard Leeu, at Gouda, in 1480, an English version appeared about 1520,—“The dialogue of Creatures moralyzed, of late translated out of Latyn in to our English tonge.”

The famous preacher and the founder of the first public school in Strasburg was John Geyler, born in 1445. He was highly esteemed by the Emperor Maximilian, and after a ministry of about thirty years, died in 1510. Two Emblem-books were left by him, both published in 1511 by James Other;—the one “Navicula sive Speculũ Fatuorum,”—The little Ship or Mirror of Fools; the other, “Navicula Penitentie,”—The little Ship of Penitence. To the first there are 110 emblems and 112 devices, each having a discourse delivered on one of the Sabbaths or festivals of the Catholic Church—the text always being, Stultorum infinitus est,—“Infinite is the number of fools.” The second, not strictly an Emblem-book, is devoted “to the praise of God and the salvation of souls in Strasburg,” and consists really of a series of sermons for Lent and other seasons of the year, but all having the same text, Ecce ascendimus Hierosolimam,—“Behold we go up to Jerusalem.” There were several reprints of both the works, and two German translations; and the edition of 1520, folio, with wood engravings, is remarkable for being the first book to which was granted the “Imperial privilege.” It is said that the rhymes of Brandt’s Ship of Fools which Geyler had translated into Latin in 1498, not unfrequently served him for texts and quotations for his sermons. Alas! we have no such lively preachers in these sleepy days of perfect propriety of phrase and person. Our prophets, in putting away “locusts and wild honey,” too often forget to cry, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

Next, however, to the famous preacher, we name a notorious prophet, the Abbot Joachim, who died between the years 1201 and 1202, but whose works, if they really were his, did not appear in print, until the folio edition was issued about 1475,—Revelations concerning the State of the chief Pontiffs. An Italian version, “Prophetia dello Abbate Joachimo circa li Pontefici & Re,” appeared in 1515; and another Latin edition, with wood engravings, by Marc-Antoine Raimondi, in 1516.^[46] Many tales are related of the Abbot and of his followers; suffice it to say, that they maintained the Gospel of Christ would be abolished A.D. 1260; and thenceforward Joachim’s “true and everlasting Gospel” was to be prevalent in the world.

According to the Blandford Catalogue, p. 6, we should here insert P. Dupont’s Satyriques Grotesques (Desseins Orig.), 8vo, Paris, 1513; but it may be passed over with the simplest notice.

If we judge from the wonderfully beautiful copy on finest vellum in the Hunterian Museum at Glasgow, the next Emblem-book surpasses all others we have named; it is the “Tewrdannckh”—or, Dear-thought,—usually attributed to Melchior Pfintzing, a German poet, born at Nuremberg in 1481, and who at one time was secretary to the Emperor Maximilian. The poem is allegorical and chivalric, and adorned with 118 plates, some of which are considered the workmanship of Albert Durer.^[47]

The Tewrdanck was intended to set forth the dangers and love adventures of the emperor himself on occasion of his marriage to the great heiress of that day, Mary of Burgundy. There are some who believe that Maximilian was the author, or at least that he sketched out the plan which Pfintzing executed. As, however, the espousals took place in 1479, before the poet was born, and Mary had early lost her life from a fall,—the probability is that the emperor supplied some of the incidents and suggestions, and that his secretary completed the work. The splendid volume was dedicated to Charles V. in 1517, and published the same year, a noble monument of typographic art.

Of a later work known under the name of “Turnierbuch,”—The Tournament-book,—by George Rüxner, namely, Beginning, Source, and Progress of Tournaments in the German nation (Siemern, S. Rodler, 1530, folio, pp. 402), Brunet informs us (Manuel, vol. iv. c. 1471), “There are found for the most part in this edition printed at the castle of Simmern” (about twenty-five miles south of Coblentz) “in 1530, the characters already employed in the two editions of the Tewrdannckh of 1517 and 1519; there may also be remarked numerous engravings on wood of the same kind as those of the romance in verse we have just cited.” The edition of 1532 “printed at the same castle,” is not in the same characters as that of 1530.

Cebes, the Theban, the disciple of Socrates, though mentioned at pp. 12, 13, must again be introduced, for an edition of his little work in Latin had appeared at Boulogne in 1497, and at Venice in 1500; also at Francfort, “by the honest men Lamperter and Murrer,” in 1507, with the letter of John Æsticampianus; the Greek was printed by Aldus in 1503, and several other editions followed up to the end of the century;—indeed there were translations into Arabic, French, Italian, German, and English.^[48]

Plate 1^b

Tableau of Human Life from Cebes. B.C. 390.

II.—Andrew Alciat, the celebrated jurisconsult, remarkable, as some testify, for serious defects, as for his surpassing knowledge and power of mind, is characterized by Erasmus as “the orator best skilled in law,” and “the lawyer most eloquent of speech;”—of his composition there was published in 1522, at Milan, an Emblematum Libellus, or “Little Book of Emblems.”^[49] It established, if it did not introduce, a new style for Emblem Literature, the classical in the place of the simply grotesque and humorous, or of the heraldic and mythic. It is by no means certain that the change should be named an unmixed gain. Stately and artificial, the school of Alciat and his followers indicates at every stanza its full acquaintance with mythologies Greek and Roman, but it is deficient in the easy expression which distinguishes the poet of nature above him whom learning chiefly guides: it seldom betrays either enthusiasm of genius or depth of imaginative power.

Nevertheless the style chimed in with the taste of the age, and the little book,—at least that edition of it which is the earliest we have seen, Augsburg, A.D. 1531,^[50] contained in eighty-eight pages, small 8vo, with ninety-seven Emblems and as many woodcuts,—won its way from being a tiny volume of 11.5 square inches of letterpress on each of eighty-eight pages, until with notes and comments it was comprised only in a large 4to of 1004 pages with thirty-seven square inches of letter-press on each page. Thus the little one that had in it only 1012 square inches of text and picture became a mountain, a monument in Alciat’s honour, numbering up 37,128 square inches of text, picture, and comment. The little book of Augsburg, 1531, may be read and digested, but only an immortal patience could labour through the entire of the great book of Padua, 1621. In that interval of ninety years, however, edition after edition of the favourite emblematist appeared; with translations into French 1536, into German 1542, into Spanish and Italian in 1549, and, if we may credit Ames’ Antiquities of Printing, Herbert’s edition, p. 1570, into English in 1551. The total number of the editions during that period was certainly not less than 130, of seventy of which a pretty close examination has been made by the writer of this sketch. The list of editions, as far as completed, numbers up about 150, and manifests a persistence in popularity that has seldom been attained.

The earliest French translator was John Lefevre, an ecclesiastic, born at Dijon in 1493,—Les Emblemes de Maistre Andre Alciat: Paris, 1536. He was secretary to Cardinal Givry, whose protection he enjoyed, and died in 1565. Bartholomew Aneau, himself an emblematist, was the next translator into French, 1549; and a third, Claude Mignault, appeared in 1583. Wolfgang Hunger, a Bavarian, in 1542,^[51] and Jeremiah Held of Nördlingen, were the German translators; Bernardino Daza Pinciano, in 1549, Los Emblemas de Alciato, was the Spanish; and Giovanni Marquale, in 1547, the Italian,—Diverse Imprese.

The notes and comments upon Alciat’s Emblems manifest great research and very extensive learning. Sebastian Stockhamer supplied commentariola, short comments, to the Lyons edition of 1556. Francis Sanctius, or Sanchez, one of the restorers of literature in Spain, born in 1523, also added commentaria to the Lyons edition of 1573. Above all we must name Claude Mignault, whose praise is that “to a varied learning he joined a rare integrity.” He was born near Dijon about 1536, and died in 1606. His comments in full appeared in Plantin’s^[52] Antwerp edition, 8vo, of 1573, and may be appealed to in proof of much patient research and extensive erudition. Lorenzo Pignoria, born at Padua in 1571, and celebrated for his study of Egyptian antiquities, also compiled notes on Alciat’s Emblems in MDCXIIX.^[53] The results of the labours of the three, Sanchez, Mignault, and Pignorius, were collected in the Padua editions of 1621 and 1661. It is scarcely possible that so many editions should have issued from the press, and so much learning have been bestowed, without the knowledge of Alciat’s Emblems having penetrated every nook and corner of the literary world.

With a glance only at the “Prognosticatio,” of Theophrastus Paracelsus, the alchemist and enthusiast, written in 1536, and expressed in thirty-two copperplates, we pass at once to the Dance of Death, by Hans Holbein, which Bewick, 1789, and Douce, 1833, in London, and Schlotthauer and Fortoul, 1832, in Munich and Paris, have made familiar to English, German, and French readers. Of Holbein himself, it is sufficient here to say that he was born at Bâle in 1495, and died in London in 1543.

Mr. Corser’s copy of the first edition of the Dance of Death, and which was the gift of Francis Douce, Esq., to Edward Vernon Utterson, supplies the following title, “Les simulachres & Historiees faces de la Mort, avtant elegammēt pourtraictes, que artificiellement imaginées: A Lyon, soubz l’escu de Coloigne, M.D.XXXVIII.” The volume is a small quarto of 104 pages, unnumbered, dedicated to Madame Johanna de Touszele, the Reverend Abbess of the convent of Saint Peter at Lyons. There are forty-one emblems, each headed by a text of scripture from the Latin version; the devices follow, with a French stanza of four lines to each; and there are sundry Dissertations by Jean de Vauzelles, an eminent divine and scholar of the same city. But who can speak of the beauty of the work? The designs by Holbein are many of them wonderfully conceived,—the engravings by Hans Lützenberge, or Leutzelburger, as admirably executed.^[54]

Rapidly was the work transferred into Latin and Italian, and before the end of the century at least fifteen editions had issued from the presses of Lyons, Bâle, and Cologne.

Scarcely less celebrated are Holbein’s Historical Figures of the Old Testament, which Sibald Beham’s had preceded in Francfort by only two years. Beham’s whole series of Bible Figures are contained in 348 prints, and were published between 1536 and 1540. Dibdin’s Decameron, vol. i. pp. 176, 177, will supply a full account of Holbein’s “Historiarum Veteris Instrumenti icones ad vivum expressæ una cum brevi, sed quoad fieri potuit, dilucida earundem expositione:” Lyons, small 4to, 1538. The edition of Frellonius, Lyons, 1547, is a very close reprint of the second edition, and from this it appears that the work is contained in fifty-two leaves, unnumbered, and that there are ninety-four devices, which are admirable specimens of wood-engraving. The first four are from the Dance of Death, but the others appropriate to the subjects, each being accompanied by a French stanza of four lines.

A Spanish translation was issued in 1543; and in 1549, at Lyons, an English version, “The Images of the Old Testament, lately expressed, set forthe in Ynglishe and Frenche, vuith a playn and brief exposition.” All the editions of the century were about twelve.

Hans Brosamer, of Fulda, laboured in the same mine, and between 1551 and 1553, copying chiefly from Holbein and Albert Durer, produced at Francfort his “Biblische Historien kunstlich fürgemalet,”—Bible Histories artistically pictured (3 vols. in 1).

We will, though somewhat earlier than the exact date, continue the subject of Bible-Figure Emblem-books by alluding to the Quadrins historiques de la Bible,—“Historic Picture-frames of the Bible,”—for the most part engraved by “Le Petit Bernard,” alias Solomon Bernard, who was born at Lyons in 1512. Of these works in French, English, Spanish, Italian, Latin, Flemish, and German, there were twenty-two editions printed between 1553 and 1583. Their general nature may be known from the fact that to each Scripture subject there is a device, in design and execution equally good, and that it is followed or accompanied by a Latin, Italian, &c. stanza, as the case may be. In the Italian version, Lyons, 1554, the Old Testament is illustrated by 222 engravings, and the New by ninety-five.

The first of the series appears to be Quadrins historiques du Genèse, Lyons, 1553; followed in the same year by Quadrins historiques de l’Exode. There is also of the same date (see Brunet, iv. c. 996), “The true and lyuely historyke Pvrtreatures of the woll Bible (with the arguments of eache figure, translated into english metre by Peter Derendel): Lyons; by Jean of Tournes.”

To conclude, there were Figures of the Bible, illustrated by French stanzas, and also by Italian and by German; published at Lyons and at Venice between 1564 and 1582. (See Brunet’s Manuel, ii. c. 1255.) Also Jost Amman, at Francfort, in 1564; and Virgil Solis, from 1560 to 1568, contributed to German works of the same character.

Two names of note among emblematists crown the years 1539 and 1540, both in Paris: they are William de la Perrière, and Giles Corrozet; of the former we know little more than that he was a native of Toulouse, and dedicated his chief work to “Margaret of France, Queen of Navarre, the only sister of the very Christian King of France;” and of the latter, that, born in Paris in 1510, and dying there in 1568, he was a successful printer and bookseller, and distinguished (see Brunet’s Manuel, ii. cc. 299–308) for a large number of works on History, Antiquities, and kindred subjects.

La Perrière’s chief Emblem-work is Le Theatre des bons Engins, auquel sont contenus cent Emblemes: Paris, 8vo, 1539. There are 110 leaves and really 101 emblems, each device having a pretty border. His other Emblem-works are—The Hundred Thoughts of Love, 1543, with woodcuts to each page; Thoughts on the Four Worlds, “namely, the divine, the angelic, the heavenly, and the sensible,” Lyons, 1552; and “La Morosophie,”—The Wisdom of Folly,—containing a hundred moral emblems, illustrated by a hundred stanzas of four lines, both in Latin and in French.

Corrozet’s “Hecatomgraphie,” Paris, 1540, is a description of a hundred figures and histories, and contains Apophthegms, Proverbs, Sentences, and Sayings, as well ancient as modern. Each page of the 100 emblems is surrounded by a beautiful border, the devices are neat woodcuts, having the same borders with La Perrière’s Theatre of good Contrivances. There is also to each a page of explanatory French verses.

It requires a stricter inquiry than I have yet been able to make in order to determine if Corrozet’s Blasons domestiques; Blason du Moys de May; and Tapisserie de l’Eglise chrestienne & catholique, bear a decided emblematical character; the titles have a taste of emblematism, but are by no means decisive of the fact.

III.—Maurice Sceve’s Delie, Object de plus haulte Vertu, Lyons, 1544, with woodcuts, and 458 ten-lined stanzas on love, is included in the Blandford Catalogue; and in the Keir Collection are both The very admirable, very magnificient and triumphant Entry of Prince Philip of Spain into Antwerp in 1549,^[55] by Grapheus, alias Scribonius; edition 1550: and Gueroult’s Premier Livre des Emblemes; Lyons, 1550. The same year, 1550, at Augsburg, has marked against it “Geschlechtes Buch,”—Pedigree-book,—which recurs in 1580.

Claude Paradin, the canon of Beaujeu, a small town on the Ardiere, in the department of the Rhone, published the first edition of his simple but very interesting Devises heroiques, with 180 woodcuts, at Lyons in 1557. It was afterwards enlarged by gatherings from Gabriel Symeoni and other writers; but, either under its own name or that of Symbola heroica (edition 1567) was very popular, and before 1600 was printed at Lyons, Antwerp, Douay, and Leyden, not fewer than twelve times. The English translation, with which it is generally admitted that Shakespeare was acquainted, was printed in London, in 12mo, in 1591, and bears the title, The Heroicall Devises of M. Clavdivs Paradin, Canon of Beauieu, “Whereunto are added the Lord Gabriel Symeons and others. Translated out of Latin into English by P.S.”

To another Paradin are assigned Quadrins historiques de la Bible, published at Lyons by Jean de Tournes, 1555; and of which the same publisher issued Spanish, English, Italian, German, and Flemish versions.

The rich Emblem Collection at Keir furnishes the first edition of each of Doni’s three Emblem-works, in 4to, printed by Antonio Francesco Marcolini at Venice in 1552–53; they are: 1. “I Mondi,”—i.e., The Worlds, celestial, terrestrial, and infernal,—2 parts in 1, with woodcuts. 2. “I Marmi,”—The Marbles,—4 parts in 1, a collection of pleasant little tales and interesting notices, with woodcuts by the printer; who also, according to Bryan, was an engraver of “considerable merit.” 3. “La Moral Filosofia,”—Moral Philosophy drawn from the ancient Writers,—2 parts in 1, with woodcuts. In it are abundant extracts from the ancient fabulists, as Lokman and Bidpai, and a variety of little narrative tales and allegories.

Of an English translation, two editions appeared in London in 1570 and 1601, during Shakespeare’s lifetime; namely, “The Morall Philosophie of Doni, englished out of italien by sir Th. North,”^[56] 4to, with engravings on wood.

Under the two titles of “Picta Poesis,” and “Limagination poetique,” Bartholomew Aneau, or Anulus, published his “exquisite little gem,” as Mr. Atkinson, a former owner of the copy which is now before me, describes the work. It appeared at Lyons in 1552, and contains 106 emblems, the stanzas to which, in the Latin edition, are occasionally in Greek, but in the French edition, “vers François des Latins et Grecz, par l’auteur mesme d’iceux.”

Achille Bocchi, a celebrated Italian scholar, the founder, in 1546, of the Academy of Bologna, Virgil Solis, of Nuremberg, an artist of considerable repute, Pierre Cousteau, or Costalius, of Lyons, and Paolo Giovio, an accomplished writer, Bishop of Nocera, give name to four of the Emblem-books which were issued in the year 1555. That of Bocchius is entitled “Symbolicarvm Qvaestionvm, libri qvinqve,” Bononiæ, 1555, 4to; and numbers up 146, or, more correctly, 150 emblems in 340 pages: the devices are the work of Giulio Bonasone, from copper-plates of great excellence. In 1556, Bononiæ Sambigucius put forth In Hermathenam Bocchiam Interpretatio, which is simply a comment on the 102nd emblem of Bocchius. Virgil Solis published in 4to, at Nuremberg, the same year, “Libellus Sartorum, seu Signorum publicorum,”—A little Book of Cobblers, or of public Signs. Cousteau’s “Pegma,”^[57] which some say appeared first in 1552, is, as the name denotes, a Structure of emblems, ninety-five in number, with philosophical narratives,—each page being surrounded by a pretty border. And Giovio’s “Dialogo dell’ Imprese Militari et Amore,”—Dialogue of Emblems of War and of Love; or, as it is sometimes named, “Ragionamento, Discourse concerning the words and devices of arms and of love, which are commonly named Emblems,”—is probably the first regular treatise on the subject which had yet appeared, and which attained high popularity.

Its estimation in England is shown by the translation which was issued in London in 1585, entitled, “The Worthy tract of Paulus Iouius, contayning a Discourse of rare inuentions, both Militarie and Amorous, called Imprese. Whereunto is added a Preface contay-ning the Arte of composing them, with many other notable deuises. By Samuell Daniell late Student in Oxenforde.”

Intimately connected with Giovio’s little work, indeed often constituting parts of the same volume, were Ruscelli’s “Discorso” on the same subject, Venice, 1556; and Domenichi’s “Ragionamento,” also at Venice, in 1556. From the testimony of Sir Egerton Brydges (Res Lit.), “Ruscelli was one of the first literati of his time, and was held in esteem by princes and all ranks of people.”

Very frequently, too, in combination with Giovio’s Dialogue on Emblems, are to be found Ruscelli’s “Imprese illvstri,” Venice, 1566; or Symeoni’s “Imprese heroiche et morali,” Lyons, 1559; and “Sententiose Imprese,” Lyons, 1562.

Roville’s Lyons edition, of 1574, thus unites in one title-page Giovio, Symeoni, and Domenichi, “Dialogo Dellimprese militari et amorose, De Monsignor Giouio Vescouo di Nocera Et del S. Gabriel Symeoni Fiorentino, Con vn ragionamento di M. Lodouico Domenichi, nel medesimo soggetto.”

Taking together all the editions in Italian, French, and Spanish, of these four authors, single or combined, which I have had the opportunity of examining, there are no less than twenty-two between 1555 and 1585, besides five or six other editions named by Brunet in his Manuel du Libraire. Roville’s French edition, 4to, Lyons, 1561, is by Vasquin Philieul, “Dialogve des Devises d’Armes et d’Amovrs dv S. Pavlo Iovio, Auec vn Discours de M. Loys Dominique—et les Deuises Heroiques et Morales du Seigneur Gabriel Symeon.”

At this epoch we enter upon ground which has been skilfully upturned and cultivated by Claude Francis Menestrier, born at Lyons in 1631, and “distinguished by his various works on heraldry, decorations, public ceremonials, &c.” (Aikin’s Gen. Biog. vii. p. 41.) In his “Philosophia Imaginum,”—Philosophy of Images,—an octavo volume of 860 pages, published at Amsterdam, 1695, he gives, in ninety-four pages, a “Judicium,” i.e., a judgment respecting all authors who have written on Symbolic Art; and of those Authors whom we have named, or may be about to name, within the Period to which our Sketch extends, he mentions that he has examined the works of

It may also be gathered from the “Judicium” that Menestrier had read with care what had been written on Emblems by the following authors:—

Excluding the editions before enumerated, the books of emblems which I have noted from various sources as assigned to the authors in the above lists from Menestrier, amount to from twenty-five to thirty, with the titles of which there is no occasion to trouble the reader.

Returning from this digression, Vincenzo Cartari should next be named in order of time. At Venice, in 1556, appeared his “Imagini Dei Dei degli Antichi,”—Images of the Gods of the Ancients,—4to, of above 500 pages. It contains an account of the Idols, Rites, Ceremonies, and other things appertaining to the old Religions. It was a work often reprinted, and in 1581 translated into French by Antoine du Verdier, the same who, in 1585, gave in folio a Catalogue of all who have written or translated into French up to that time.

A folio of 1100 pages, which within the period of our sketch was reprinted four times, issued from Bâle in 1556; it is, “Hieroglyphica,”—Hieroglyphics, or, Commentaries on the Sacred Literature of the Egyptians,—by John Pierius Valerian, a man of letters, born in extreme poverty at Belluno in 1477, and untaught the very elements of learning until he was fifteen. (Aikin’s Gen. Biog. ix. 537.) He died in 1558. As an exposition of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, his very learned work is little esteemed; but it contains emblems innumerable, comprised in fifty-eight books, each book dedicated to a person of note, and treating one class of objects. The devices—small woodcuts—amount to 365.

Etienne Jodelle, a poet, equally versatile whether in Latin or in French, was skilled in the ancient languages, and acquainted with the arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture, as well as dexterous in the use of arms. He published, in 1558, a thin quarto “Recueil,” or Collection of the inscriptions, figures, devices, and masks ordained in Paris at the Hôtel de Ville. The same year, and again in 1569 and 1573, appeared the large folio volume, in five parts, “Austriacis Gentis Imagines,”—Portraits of the Austrian family,—full lengths, engraved by Gaspar ab Avibus, of Padua. At the foot of each portrait are a four-lined stanza, a brief biographical notice, and some emblematical figure. Of similar character, though much inferior as a work of art, is Jean Nestor’s Histoire des Hommes illustres de la Maison de Medici; a quarto of about 240 leaves, printed at Paris in 1564. (See the Keir Catalogue, p. 143.) It contains “twelve woodcuts of the emblems of the different members of the House of Medici.”

Hoffer’s “Icones catecheseos,” or Pictures of instruction, and of virtues and vices, illustrated by verses, and also by seventy-eight figures or woodcuts, was printed at Wittenberg in 1560. The next year, 1561—if not in 1556 (see Brunet’s Manuel, vol. ii. cc. 930, 931)—John Duvet, one of the earliest engravers on copper in France, at Lyons, published in twenty-four plates, folio, his chief work, “Lapocalypse figuree;” and in 1562, at Naples, the Historian of Florence, Scipione Ammirato, gave to the world “Il Rota overo dell’ Imprese,” or, Dialogue of the Sig. Scipione Ammirato, in which he discourses of many emblems of divers excellent authors, and of some rules and admonitions concerning this subject written to the Sig. Vincenzo Carrafa.

Were it less a subject of debate between Dutch and German critics as to the exact character of the “Spelen van sinne,”^[59] which were published by the Chambers of Rhetoric at Ghent in 1539, and by those of Antwerp in 1561 and 1562 (see Brunet’s Manuel, vol. v. c. 484), we should claim these works for our Emblem domain. But whether claimed or not, the exhibitions and amusements of the Chambers of Rhetoric, especially at their great gatherings in the chief cities of the Netherlands, were often very lively representations by action and accessory devices of dramatic thought and sentiment, from “King Herod and his Deeds,” “enacted in the Cathedral of Utrecht in 1418,” to what Motley, in his Dutch Republic, vol. i. p. 80, terms the “magnificent processions, brilliant costumes, living pictures, charades, and other animated, glittering groups,”—“trials of dramatic and poetic skill, all arranged under the superintendence of the particular association which in the preceding year had borne away the prize.”

“The Rhetorical Chambers existed in the most obscure villages” (Motley, i. p. 79); and had regular constitutions, being presided over by officers with high-sounding titles, as kings, princes, captains, and archdeacons,—and each having “its peculiar title or blazon, as the Lily, the Marigold, or the Violet, with an appropriate motto.” After 1493 they were “incorporated under the general supervision of an upper or mother-society of Rhetoric, consisting of fifteen members, and called by the title of ‘Jesus with the balsam flower.’”

As I have been informed by Mr. Hessells, Siegenbeek, in his Geschiedenis der Nederlandsche Letterkunde, says,—“Besides the ordinary meetings of the Chambers, certain poetical feasts were in vogue among the Rhetor-gevers, whereby one or other subject, to be responded to in burdens or short songs (liedekens), according to the contents of the card, was announced, with the promise of prizes to those who would best answer the proposed question. But the so-called Entries deserve for their magnificence, and the diversity of poetical productions which they give rise to, especially our attention.

“It happened from time to time that one or other of the most important Chambers sent a card in rhyme to the other Chambers of the same province, whereby they were invited to be at a given time in the town where the senders of the card were established, for the sake of the celebration of a poetical feast. This card contained further everything by which it was desired that the Chambers, which were to make their appearance, should illustrate this feast, viz., the performance of an allegorical play (zinnespel) in response to some given question;^[60] the preparation of esbatementez (drawings), facéties (jests), prologues; the execution of splendid entries and processions; the exhibitions of beautifully painted coats of arms, &c. These entries were of two kinds, landiuweelen, and haagspelen>;—the landjewels were the most splendid, and were performed in towns; the hedge-plays belonged properly to villages, though sometimes in towns these followed the performance of a landjewel.” Originally, landjewel meant a prize of honour of the land; called also landprys (land-prize).

Such were the periodic jubilees of a neighbouring people, their “land-jewels,” as they were termed, when the birthtime of our greatest English dramatist arrived. And as we mark the wide and increasing streams of the Emblem Literature flowing over every European land, and how the common tongue of Rome gave one language to all Christendom, can we deem it probable that any man of genius, of discernment, and of only the usual attainments of his compeers, would live by the side of these streams and never dip his finger into the waters, nor wet even the soles of his feet where the babbling emblems flowed?

Some there have been to maintain that Shakespeare had visited the Netherlands, or even resided there; and it is consequently within the limits of no unreasonable conjecture that he had seen the landjewels distributed, and at the sight felt himself inspirited to win a nobler fame.

Whitney, 1586.

IN the year at which this Section begins, Shakespeare was born, and for a whole century the Emblem tide never ebbed. There was an uninterrupted succession of new writers and of new editions. Many eminent names have appeared in the past, and names as eminent will adorn the future.

The fifty years which remain to the period comprised within the limits of this Sketch of Emblem Literature we divide into two portions of twenty-five years each: 1st, up to 1590, when Shakespeare had fairly entered on his dramatic career; and 2nd, from 1590 to 1615, when, according to Steevens (edition 1785, vol. i. p. 354), his labours had ended with The Twelfth Night, or, What You Will. As far as actual correspondences between Shakespeare and the Emblem Writers demand, our Sketch might finish with 1610, or even earlier: for some time will of necessity intervene, after a work has been issued, before it will modify the thoughts of others, or enter into the phrases which they employ. However, there is nothing very incongruous in making this Sketch and the last of Shakespeare’s dramas terminate with the same date.

I.—In 1564, at Rome, in 4to, the distinguished Latinist, Gabriel Faerno’s Fables were first printed, 100 in number;—it was three years after his death. The plates are from designs which Titian is said to have drawn. Our English Whitney adopts several of Faerno’s Fables among his Emblems, and on this authority we class them with books of Emblems. From time to time, as late as to 1796, new editions and translations of the Fables have been issued. A copy in the Free Library, Manchester, “Romæ Vincentius Luchinus, 1565,” bears the title, Fabvlae Centvm ex antiqvis avctoribvs delectae, et a Gabriele Faerno, Cremonensi carminibvs explicatae.

Virgil Solis, a native of Nuremberg, where he was born in 1514, and where he died in 1570; and Jost Amman, who was born at Zurich in 1539, but passed his life at Nuremberg, and died there in 1591, were both artists of high repute, and contributed to the illustration of Emblem-works. The former, between 1560 and 1568, produced 125 New Figures for the New Testament, and An Artistic little Book of Animals; and the latter, from 1564 to 1586, contributed very largely to books of Biblical Figures, of “Animals,” of “Genealogies,” of “Heraldry,” and of the Habits and Costumes of All Ranks of the Clergy of the Roman Church, and of Women of every “Condition, profession, and age,” throughout the nations of Europe.

From the press of Christopher Plantin, of Antwerp, there issued nearly fifty editions of Emblem-books between 1564 and 1590. Of these, one of the earliest was, “Emblemata cvm aliqvot Nvmmis antiqvis,”—Emblems with some ancient Coins,—4to, 1564, by the Hungarian, John Sambucus, born at Tornau in 1531. A French version, Les Emblemes de Jehan Sambucus, issued from the same press in 1567. Among Emblematists, none bears a fairer name as “physician, antiquary, and poet.” According to De Bry’s Icones, pt. iii., ed. 1598, pp. 76–83, he obtained the patronage of two emperors, Maximilian II. and Rudolph II., under whom he held the offices of counsellor of state and historian of the empire. To him also belonged the rare honour of having his work commented on by one of the great heroes of Christendom, Don John of Austria, in 1572.

Les Songes drolatiqves de Pantagrvel, by Rabelais, appeared at Paris in 1565, but its emblematical character has been doubted. Not so, however, the ten editions of the “Emblemata” of Hadrian Junius, a celebrated Dutch physician, of which the first edition appeared in 1565, and justly claims to be “the most elegant which the presses of Plantin had produced at this period.”

We may now begin to chronicle a considerable number of works and editions of Emblems by Italian writers, which, to avoid prolixity and yet to point out, we present in a tabulated form, giving only the earliest editions:—

So, briefly, in the order of time, may we name several of the French, Latin, and German Emblem-writers of this period, together with the Spanish and English:—

Of these works, Vander Noot’s was translated into English, says Brunet, (v. c. 1072,) by Henry Bynneman, 1569, and is remarkable for containing (see Ath. Cantab. ii. p. 258) certain poems, termed sonnets, and epigrams, which Spenser wrote before his sixteenth year. Mademoiselle Georgette de Montenay was a French lady of noble birth, and dedicated her 100 Emblems “to the very illustrious and virtuous Princesse, Madame Jane D’Albret, Queen of Navarre.” Chartier, a painter and engraver, flourished about 1574; L’Anglois is not mentioned in the Hieroglyphics of Dr. Leemans, nor do I find any notice of Messin.

Arias Montanus, born in Estremadura in 1527, was one of the very eminent scholars of Spain; Furmerus, a Frieslander, flourished during the latter half of the sixteenth century, and his work was translated into Dutch by Coörnhert in 1585; Henri Estienne, one of the celebrated printers of that name, was born in Paris in 1528, and died at Lyons in 1598; a list of his works, many of them of high scholarship, occupies eight pages in Brunet’s Manuel du Libraire. The name of Beza is of similar renown;—both Etienne and he had to seek safety from persecution; and when Etienne’s effigy was being burnt, he pleasantly said “that he had never felt so cold as on the day when he was burning.” Laurence Haechtanus was the author of the Parvus Mundus, 1579, which Gerardt de Jode den liefhebbers der consten, the lover of art, has so admirably adorned. Nicolas Reusner was a man of extensive learning, to whom the emperor Rudolph II. decreed the poetic crown. Francis Modius was a Fleming, a learned jurisconsult and Latinist, who died at Aire in Artois, in 1597, at the age of sixty-one; Theodore Zuinger was a celebrated physician of Bâle; and Joachim Camerarius, born at Nuremberg in 1534, also a celebrated physician, one of the first to form a botanical garden, “attained high reputation in his profession, and was consulted for princes and persons of rank throughout Germany.”

An edition of a work reputed to be emblematic belongs to this period—to 1587; it is the Physiologist, by S. Epiphanius, to whom allusion has been made at p. 28.

Tobias Stimmer was an artist, born at Schaffhausen in 1544, and in conjunction with his younger brother, John Christopher Stimmer, executed part of the woodcuts in the Bible of Basle, 1576 and 1586. The younger brother also prepared the prints for a set of Emblems, Icones Affabræ, published at Strasburg in 1591. Sigismund Feyrabend is a name of great note as a designer, engraver on wood, and bookseller, at Francfort, towards the end of the sixteenth century. Who Martin Schrot was, does not appear from the Biographie Universelle; and Clamorinus may probably be regarded as only the editor of a republication of Rüxner’s Book of Tournaments that was printed in 1530.

Don Juan Manuel was a descendant of the famous Alphonso V. His work consists of forty-nine little tales, with a moral in verse to each. It is regarded, says the Biog. Univ. vol. xxvi. p. 541, “as the finest monument of Spanish literature in the sixteenth century.” There are earlier editions of Francisco de Guzman’s Moral Triumphs, as at Antwerp in 1557, but the edition above named claims to be more perfect than the others. Horozco y Covaruvias was a native of Toledo, and died in 1608; one of his offices was that of Bishop of Girgenti in Sicily. In 1601 he translated his Emblems into Latin, and printed it under the title of Symbolæ Sacræ.

Henry Bynneman, whose name is placed before the version of Vander Noot’s Theatre, is not known with any certainty to have been the translator. He was a celebrated printer in London from about 1566 to 1583. Sir Thomas North, to whose translation of Plutarch, Shakespeare was largely indebted, was probably an ancestor of the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal under Charles II. Samuel Daniell enjoyed considerable reputation as a poet, and on Spenser’s death in 1598, was appointed poet-laureate to the Queen. Of Whitney it is known that he was a scholar of Oxford and of Cambridge, and that his name appears on the roll of the university of Leyden. He was a native of Cheshire, and died there in 1601. It may be added that an edition of Barclay’s Ship of Fooles was in 1570 “Imprinted at London in Paules Churchyarde by John Cawood Printer to the Queenes Maiestie.”

Thus, in the period between Shakespeare’s birth and his full entry on his dramatic career, we have named above sixty persons, many of great eminence, who amused their leisure, or indulged their taste, by composing books of Emblems; had we named also the editions of the same authors, within these twenty-five years, they would have amounted to 156, exclusive of many reprints from other authors who wrote Emblems between A.D. 1500 and A.D. 1564.

II.—Shakespeare’s Dramatic Career comprises another period of twenty-five years,—from 1590 to 1615. From the necessity of the case, indeed, few, if any of the Emblem writers and compilers towards the end of the time could be known to him, and any correspondence between them in thoughts or expressions must have been purely accidental. For the completion of our Sketch, however, we proceed to the end of the period we had marked out. And to save space, and, we hope, to avoid tediousness, we will continue the tabulated form adopted in the last Section.

Giulio Cesare Capaccio, besides his Neapolitan History, and one or two other works, is also the author of Il Principe, Venetia, 1620, a treatise on the Emblems of Alciatus, with more than 200 political and moral notices. Torquato Tasso is a name that needs no praise here. Of Alessio Porri I have found no other mention; and I may say the same of Gio. Dalla Torre, of Ottavio Caputi, and of Gio. Belloni. Melchior Zoppio, born in 1544 at Bologna (Biog. Univ. vol. lii. p. 430), was one of the founders of the Academia di Gelati, in his native town. Battisti Pittoni was a painter and engraver, who flourished between 1561 and 1585. The extensive work of Cesare Ripa of Perugia, which has passed through about twenty editions in Italian, Latin, Dutch, Spanish, German, and English, is alphabetically arranged, and treats of nearly 800 different subjects, with about 200 devices. Otho van Veen, or Vænius, belongs to Holland, not to Italy,—and his name appears here simply because his Emblems of Love were translated into Italian. Fabio Glissenti in 1609 introduced into his work (Brunet, iii. c. 256, 7) twenty-four of the plates out of the forty-one which adorned an Italian edition of the Images of Death in 1545.

Robert Boissart, a French engraver (Bryan, p. 90) flourished about 1590, and is said to have resided some time in England. Of Vænius, so well known, there is no occasion to speak here. Jacques de Vasseur was archdeacon of Noyon, celebrated as the birth-place of Calvin, and in 1608 also published another work in French verse, Antithises, ov Contrepointes du Ciel & de la Terre. Desprez and Valence are unknown save by their books of Emblems. Pierre Dinet is very briefly named in Biog. Univ. vol. ii. p. 371; and Rollenhagen and De Bry will be mentioned presently.

Peter Vander Borcht, born at Brussels about A.D. 1540, engraved numerous works, and among them 178 prints for this edition of Ovid. The Stimmers have been mentioned before, p. 90. Jean Mercier, born at Uzès in Languedoc, wrote the Latin version of the Hieroglyphics of Horapollo, Paris, 1548,—but probably it was his son Josias whose Emblems are mentioned under the year 1592, and who dates them from Bruges. Theodore De Bry, born at Liege in 1528 (Bryan, p. 119), carried on the business of an engraver and bookseller in Francfort, where he died in 1598. He was greatly assisted by his sons John Theodore and John Israel. The Procession of the Knights of the Garter in 1566, and that at the Funeral of Sir Philip Sidney, are his workmanship. Nicolas Taurellius was a student, and afterwards professor of Physic and Medicine in the University of Altorf in Franconia. An oration of his appears in the Emblemata Anniversaria of that institution. He was named “the German Philosopher.” Denis le Bey de Batilly appears to have been royal president of the Consistory of Metz. John David, born at Courtray in Flanders, in 1546, entered the Society of the Jesuits, and was rector of the colleges of Courtray, Brussels, and Ghent; he died in 1613. Ægidius Sadeler, known as the Phœnix of engravers, was a native of Antwerp, born in 1570, the nephew and disciple of the two eminent engravers John and Raphael Sadeler. He enjoyed a pension from three successive emperors, Rodolphus II., Matthias, and Ferdinand II. Of Crispin de Passe, born at Utrecht about 1560, Bryan (p. 548) says, “He was a man of letters, and not only industrious to perfect himself in his art, but fond of promoting it.” His works were numerous, and have examples in the Emblem-books of his day. Otho van Veen, of a distinguished family, was born at Leyden in 1556. After a residence of seven years in Italy, he established himself at Antwerp, and had the rare claim to celebrity that Rubens became his disciple. In his Emblem-works the designs were by himself, but the engravings by his brother Gilbert van Veen. (Bryan, p. 853, 4.) Lawrence Pignorius, born at Padua, 1571, and educated at the Jesuits’ school and the university of that city, gained a high reputation by several learned works, and especially by those on Egyptian antiquities. He died of the plague in 1631. The work of Richard Lubbæus Broecmer, is little more than a reprint of one by Bernard Furmer, in 1575, On the Use and Abuse of Wealth. Jerome Aleander, nephew of one of Luther’s stoutest opponents, the Cardinal Aleander, was of considerable literary reputation at Rome, being a member of the society of Humourists, established in that city,—his death was in 1631. According to Oetlinger’s brief notice, Bibliog. Biograph. Univ., Gabriel Rollenhagen, of Magdeburg, was a German schoolmaster, born in 1542, and dying in 1609; his Kernel of Emblems is well illustrated by Crispin de Passe. The same “excellent engraver” adorned The Mirror of Heroes, founded on Homer’s Iliad by “le sieur de la Rivière, Isaac Hillaire.” Both Latin and French verses are appended to the Emblems, and at their end are curious “Epitaphs on the Heroes who fell in the Trojan war,” too late, it is to be feared, to afford any gratification to their immediate friends. To Jacobus à Bruck, surnamed of Angermunde, a town of Brandenberg, there belongs another Emblem-book, Emblemata Politica, Cologne, 1618. In it are briefly demonstrated the duties which belong to princes; it is dedicated “to his most merciful Prince and Lord, the Emperor Matthias I., ‘semper Augusto.’”

De Bry, Sadeler, David, and Vænius have been mentioned in page 96. Theocritus à Ganda is known for this work, The Mirror of virtuous Women, for which Jost de Hondt executed the fine copper-plates that accompany it; and also for Emblemata Amatoria Nova, published at Amsterdam in 1608, and at Leyden in 1613. The Little World, by Jan Moerman, is of the same class with Le Microcosme, Lyons, 1562, by Maurice de Sceve; or with “ΜΙΚΡΟΚΟΣΜΟΣ,” Antwerp, 1584 and 1594, and which Sir Wm. Stirling-Maxwell attributes to Henricus Costerius of Antwerp. The New Mirror of Youth, 1610; The Delineations, 1611; The golden Ship of the Art-loving Netherlander finished, 1613; and Bellerophon, or Pleasure of Wisdom, 1614; are all anonymous. Roemer van Visscher, born at Amsterdam in 1547 (Biog. Univ. vol. xlix. p. 276), is of high celebrity as a Dutch poet,—with Spiegel and Coörnhert, he was one of the chief restorers of the Dutch language, and an immediate predecessor of the two illustrious poets of Holland, Cornelius van Hooft and Josse du Vondel.

Hernando de Soto was auditor and comptroller for the King of Spain in his house of Castile. At the end are stanzas of three verses each, in Latin and Spanish on alternate pages, “to our Lady the Virgin.” Don Sebastian de Couarrubias Orozco was chaplain to the King of Spain, schoolmaster and canon of Cuenca, and adviser of the Holy Office. Both Soto and Orozco dedicate their works to Don Francisco Gomez de Sandoual, Duke of Lerma. Juan Francisco de Villava dedicates his first Emblem “to the Holy and General Inquisition of Spain.” Neither of the three names occurs in the Biographies to which I have access.

William Wyrley’s True use of Arms, was reprinted in 1853. In Censura Lit., i. p. 313, Samuel Egerton Brydges gives a pleasing account of the character of Andrew Willet, whom Fuller ranks among England’s worthies (vol. i. p. 238). Of John Crosse himself, nothing is known, but his MS. is certainly not later than Elizabeth’s reign, for the royal arms, at p. 33, are of earlier date than the accession of the Stuarts; and the allusion to the Belgian dames, pp. 2–6, agrees with her times. The work contains 120 shields and devices, and was lent me by my very steadfast friend in Emblem lore, Mr. Corser of Stand. At pp. 10 and 37, it is said,—

and

Now it was in 1561 Richard Mulcaster, of King’s College, Cambridge, and of Christchurch, Oxford, was appointed head master of Merchant-Taylor’s School in London, then just founded. (Warton, iii. 282.) Thus it is shown to be very probable that Crosse his Covert may take date not later than A.D. 1600. It may be added that at the end of the MS. the figure of Fortune, or Occasion, on a wheel, is almost a fac-simile from Whitney’s Device, p. 181, which was itself struck from the block (Emb. 121. p. 438) of Plantin’s edition of Alciatus, MDLXXXI. John Guillim’s work on Heraldry passed through five editions previous to that of Capt. John Logan, in 1724; the original folio is one of the book-treasures at Keir. Henry Peacham, M^r. of Artes, as he terms himself, was a native of Leverton in Holland, in the county of Lincoln, and a student under “the right worshipfull Mr. D. Laifeild,” in Trinity College, Cambridge. He has dedicated his work “to the Right High and Mightie Henrie, Eldest Sonne of our Soveraigne Lord the King.”

Singular it is, that except the MS. which belonged to the late Joseph B. Yates, of Liverpool, there is not known to exist any translation into English of the once famous Emblems of Alciatus. That MS. (see Transact. Liverpool L. and P. Society, Nov. 5, 1849) “appears to be of the time of James the First.” The Devices are drawn and coloured, and have considerable resemblance to those in Rapheleng’s edition of Alciatus, 1608. As a specimen we add the translation of Emblem XXXIII. p. 39, “Signa fortium.”

How pleasant to feel that this Sketch of Emblem-books and their authors, previous to and during the times of Shakespeare, has been brought to an end. “Vina coronant,” fill a bumper, “let the sparkling glass go round.”

The difficulty really has been to compress. The materials collected were most abundant. From curiously or artistically arranged title pages,—from various dedications,—from devices admirably designed or of wondrous oddity,—and from the countless collateral subjects among which the Emblem writers and their commentators disported themselves, the temptations were so rich to wander off here and there, that it was necessary continually to remember that it was a veritable sketch I was engaged on and not a universal history. I lashed myself therefore to the mast and sailed through a whole sea of syrens, deaf, though they charmed ever so sweetly to make me sing with them of emperors and kings, of popes and cardinals, of the learned and the gay, who appeared to believe that everyone’s literary salvation depended on the contrivance of a device and the interpretation of an emblem.

Had I known where to refer my readers for a general view of my subject, either brief or prolix, I should have spared myself the labour of compiling one. The results are, that, previous to the year 1616, the Emblem Literature of Europe could claim for its own at least 200 authors, not including translators, and that above 770 editions of original texts and of versions had issued from the press.^[63]

If Shakespeare knew nothing of so wide-spread a literature it is very wonderful; and more wondrous far, if knowing, he did not inweave some of the threads into the very texture of his thoughts.

In this Sketch of Emblem writers, it will be perceived, though their names are seldom heard of except among the antiquaries of letters, that, as a class, they were men of deep erudition, of considerable natural power, and of large attainments. To the literature of their age they were as much ornaments as to the literature of our modern times are the works, illustrated or otherwise, with which our hours of leisure are wont to be both amused and instructed. No one who is ignorant of them can possess a full idea of the intellectual treasures of the more cultivated nations of Europe about the period of which the works of Alciatus and of Giovio are the types. We may be learned in its controversies, well read in its ecclesiastical and political history, intimate even with the characters and pursuits of its great statesmen and sovereigns, and strong as well as enlightened in our admiration of its painters, statuaries, poets, and other artistic celebrities, but we are not baptized into its perfect spirit unless we know what entertainment and refreshing there were for men’s minds when serious studies were intermitted and the weighty cares and business of life for a while laid aside.

Take up these Emblem writers as great statesmen and victorious commanders did; read them as did the recluse in his study and the man of the world at his recreation; search into them as some did for good morals suitable to the guidance of their lives, and as others did for snatches of wit and learning fitted to call forth their merriment; and see, amid divers conceits and many quaintnesses, and not a few inanities and vanities, how richly the fancy was indulged, and how freely the play of genius was allowed; and then will you be better prepared to estimate the whole literature of the nations of that busy, stirring time, when authorities were questioned that had reigned unchallenged for centuries, and men’s minds were awakened to all the advantages of learning, and their tastes formed for admiring the continually varying charms of the poet’s song and the artist’s skill.

True; those strange turns of thought, those playings upon mere words, those fanciful dreamings, those huntings up and down of some unfortunate idea through all possible and impossible doublings and windings, are not approved either by a purer taste, or by a better-trained judgment. We have outgrown the customs of those logo-maniacs, or word-worshippers, whom old Ralph Cudworth, in his True Intellectual System of the Universe, p. 67, seems to have had in view, when he affirms, “that they could not make a Rational Discourse of anything, though never so small, but they must stuff it with their Quiddities, Entities, Essences, Hæcceities, and the like.”

But at the revival of literature, when the ancient learning was devoured without being digested, and the modern investigations were not always controlled by sound discretion,—when the child was as a giant, and the giant disported himself in fantastic gambols,—we must not wonder that compositions, both prose and poetic, were perpetrated which receive unhesitatingly from the higher criticism the sentence of condemnation. But in condemning let not the folly be committed of despising and undervaluing. We may devotedly love our more advanced civilization, our finer sensibilities, and our juster estimate of what true taste for the beautiful demands, and yet we may accord to our leaders and fathers in learning and refinement the no unworthy commendation, that, with their means and in their day, they gave a mighty onward movement to those literary pursuits and pleasures in which the powers of the fancy heighten the glow of our joy, and the resources of accurate knowledge bestow an abiding worth upon our intellectual labours.

Sambucus, 1564.

CHAPTER III. SHAKESPEARE’S ATTAINMENTS AND OPPORTUNITIES WITH RESPECT TO THE FINE ARTS.

AMONG some warm admirers of Shakespeare it has not been unusual to depreciate his learning for the purpose of exalting his genius. It is thought that intuition and inborn power of mind accomplished for him what others, less favoured by the inspiration of the all-directing Wisdom, could scarcely effect by their utmost and life-patient labours. The worlds of nature and of art were spread before him, and out of the materials, with perfect ease, he fashioned new creations, calling into existence forms of beauty and grace, and investing them at will with the rare attributes of poetic fancy.

On the very surface, however, of Shakespeare’s writings, in the subjects of his dramas and in the structure of their respective plots, though we may not find a perfectly accurate scholarship, we have ample evidence that the choicest literature of his native land, and, through translations at least, the ample stores of Greece and of Italy were open to his mind. Whether his scenes be the plains of Troy, the river of Egypt, the walls of Athens, or the capitol of Rome, his learning is amply sufficient for the occasion; and though the critic may detect incongruities and errors,^[64] they are probably not greater than those which many a finished scholar falls into when he ventures to describe the features of countries and cities which he has not actually visited. The heroes and heroines of pagan mythology and pagan history, the veritable actors in ancient times of the world’s great drama,—or the more unreal characters of fairy land, of the weird sisterhood, and of the wizard fraternity,—these all stand before us instinct with life.^[65] And from the old legends of Venice, of Padua and Verona,—from the traditionary lore of England, of Denmark, and of Scotland,—or from the more truth-like delineations of his strictly historical plays, we may of a certainty gather, that his reading was of wide extent, and that with a student’s industry he made it subservient to the illustration and faithfulness of poetic thought.

Trusting, as we may do in a very high degree, to Douce’s Illustrations of Shakspeare and of Ancient Manners (2 vols., London, 1807), or to the still more elaborate and erudite work of Dr. Nathan Drake, Shakspeare and his Times (2 vols., 4to, London, 1817), we need not hesitate at resting on Mr. Capel Lofft’s conclusion, that Shakespeare possessed “a very reasonable portion of Latin; he was not wholly ignorant of Greek; he had a knowledge of French, so as to read it with ease; and I believe not less of the Italian. He was habitually conversant with the chronicles of his country. He lived with wise and highly cultivated men, with Jonson, Essex, and Southampton, in familiar friendship.” (See Drake, vol. i. pp. 32, 33, note.) And again, “It is not easy, with due attention to his poems, to doubt of his having acquired, when a boy, no ordinary facility in the classic language of Rome; though his knowledge of it might be small, comparatively, to the knowledge of that great and indefatigable scholar, Ben Jonson.”

Dr. Drake and Mr. Capel Lofft differ in opinion, though not very widely, as to the extent of Shakespeare’s knowledge of Italian literature. The latter declares, “My impression is, that Shakespeare was not unacquainted with the most popular authors in Italian prose, and that his ear had listened to the enchanting tones of Petrarca, and some others of their great poets.” And the former affirms, that “From the evidence which his genius and his works afford, his acquaintance with the French and Italian languages was not merely confined to the picking up a familiar phrase or two from the conversation or writings of others, but that he had actually commenced, and at an early period too, the study of these languages, though, from his situation, and the circumstances of his life, he had neither the means, nor the opportunity, of cultivating them to any considerable extent.” (See Drake, vol. i. pp. 54, note, and 57, 58.)

Now the Emblem-writers of the sixteenth century, and previously, made use chiefly of the Latin, Italian, and French languages. Of the Emblem-books in Spanish, German, Flemish, Dutch, and English, only the last would be available for Shakespeare’s benefit, except for the suggestions which the engravings and woodcuts might supply. It is then well for us to understand that his attainments with respect to language were sufficient to enable him to study this branch of literature, which before his day, and in his day, was so widely spread through all the more civilized countries of Europe. He possessed the mental apparatus which gave him power, should inclination or fortune lead him there, to cultivate the viridiaria, the pleasant blooming gardens of emblem, device, and symbol.

Even if he had not been able to read the Emblem writers in their original languages, undoubtedly he would meet with their works in the society in which he moved and among the learned of his native land. As we have seen, he was in familiar friendship with the Earl of Essex. To that nobleman Willet, in 1598, had dedicated his Sacred Emblems. Of men of Devereux’s stamp, several had become acquainted with the Emblem Literature. To his rival, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, Whitney devoted the Choice of Emblemes, 1586; in 1580, Beza had honoured the young James of Scotland with the foremost place in his Portraits of Illustrious Men, to which a set of Emblems were appended; Sir Philip Sidney, during his journey on the continent, 1571–1575, became acquainted with the works of the Italian emblematist, Ruscelli; and as early as 1549, it was “to the very illustrious Prince James earl of Arran in Scotland,” that “Barptolemy Aneau” commended his French version of Alciat’s classic stanzas.

And were it not a fact, as we can show it to be, that Shakespeare quotes the very mottoes and describes the very drawings which the Emblem-books contain, we might, from his highly cultivated taste in other respects, not unreasonably conclude that he must both have known them and have used them. His information and exquisite judgment extended to works of highest art,—to sculpture, painting, and music, as well as to literature. There is, perhaps, no description of statuary extant so admirable for its truth and beauty as the lines quoted by Drake, p. 617, from the Winter’s Tale,^[66] “where Paulina unveils to Leontes the supposed statue of Hermione.”

This exquisite piece of statuary is ascribed by Shakespeare (Winter’s Tale, act v. sc. 2, l. 8, vol. iii. p. 420) to “that rare Italian master Julio Romano, who, had he himself eternity, and could put breath into his work, would beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly is he her ape: he so near to Hermione hath done Hermione, that they say one would speak to her, and stand in hope of answer.”

According to Kugler’s “Geschichte der Malerei,”—History of Painting (Berlin, 1847, vol. i. p. 641),—Julio Romano was one of the most renowned of Raphael’s scholars, born about 1492, and dying in 1546. “Giulio war ein Künstler von rüstigem, lebendig, bewegtem, keckem Geiste, begabt mit einer Leichtigkeit der Hand, welche den kühnen und rastlosen Bildern seiner Phantasie überall Leben und Dasein zu geben wusste.”^[68]

His earlier works are to be found at Rome, Genoa, and Dresden. Soon after Raphael’s death he was employed in Mantua both as an architect and a painter; and here exist some of his choice productions, as the Hunting by Diana, the frescoes of the Trojan War, the histories of Psyche, and other Love-tales of the gods. Pictures by him are scattered over Europe,—some at Venice, some in the sacristy of St. Peter’s, and in other places in Rome; some in the Louvre, and some in the different collections of England,^[69] as the Jupiter among the Nymphs and Corybantes.

Whether any of his works were in England during the reign of Elizabeth, we cannot affirm positively; but as there were “sixteen by Julio Romano” in the fine collection of paintings at Whitehall, made, or, rather, increased by Charles I., of which Henry VIII. had formed the nucleus, it is very probable there were in England some by that master so early as the writing of the Winter’s Tale, or even before, in which, as we have seen, he is expressly named. It may therefore be reasonably conjectured that in the statue of Hermione Shakespeare has accurately described some figure which he had seen in one of Julio Romano’s paintings.

The same rare appreciation of the beautiful appears in the Cymbeline, act ii. sc. 4, lines 68–74, 81–85, 87–91, vol. ix. pp. 207, 208, where the poet describes the adornments of Imogen’s chamber:—

So, in the Taming of the Shrew, act ii. sc. 1, lines 338–348, vol. iii. p. 45, Gremio enumerates the furniture of his house in Padua:—

And Hamlet, when he contrasts his father and his uncle, act iii. sc. 4, lines 55–62, vol. viii. p. 111, what a force of artistic skill does he not display! It is indeed a poet’s description, but it has all the power and reality of a most finished picture. The very form and features are presented, as if some limner, a perfect master of his pencil, had portrayed and coloured them:—

In the Merchant of Venice, too, act iii. sc. 2, lines 115–128, vol. ii. p. 328, when Bassanio opens the leaden casket and discovers the portrait of Portia, who but one endowed with a painter’s inspiration could speak of it as Shakespeare does!—

Such power of estimating artistic skill authorises the supposition that Shakespeare himself had made the painter’s art a subject of more than accidental study; else whence such expressions as those which in the Antony, act ii. sc. 2, lines 201–209, vol. ix. p. 38, are applied to Cleopatra?—

Or, even when sportively, in Twelfth Night, act i. sc. 5, lines 214–230, vol. iii. p. 240, Olivia replies to Viola’s request, “Good Madam, let me see your face,”—is it not quite in an artist’s or an amateur’s style that the answer is given? “We will draw the curtain and show you the picture. Look you, sir, such a one I was this present: is’t not well done?” [Unveiling.

Oli. O, sir, I will not be so hard-hearted; I will give out divers schedules of my beauty: it shall be inventoried, and every particle and utensil labelled to my will: as, item, two lips, indifferent red; item, two grey eyes, with lids to them; item, one neck, one chin, and so forth.”

But from certain lines in the Taming of the Shrew (Induction, sc. 2, lines 47–58), it is evident that Shakespeare had seen either some of the mythological pictures by Titian, or engravings from them, or from similar subjects. Born in 1477, and dying in 1576, in his ninety-ninth year, the great Italian artist was contemporary with a long series of illustrious men, and his fame and works had shone far beyond their native sky. Our distant and then but partially civilised England awoke to a perception of their beauties, and though few—if any—of Titian’s paintings so early found a domicile in this country, yet pictures were, we are assured,^[71] “a frequent decoration in the rooms of the wealthy.” Shakespeare even represents the Countess of Auvergne, 1 Henry VI., act ii. sc. 3, lines 36, 37, vol. v. p. 33, as saying to Talbot,—

The formation of a royal gallery, or collection of paintings, had engaged the care of Henry VIII.; and the British nobility at the time of his daughter Elizabeth’s reign, “deeply read in classical learning, familiar with the literature of Italy, and polished by foreign travel,” “were well qualified to appreciate and cultivate the true principles of taste.”

Titian, as is well known, “displayed a singular mastery in the representation of nude womanly forms, and in this the witchery of his colouring is manifested with fullest power.”^[72] Many instances of this are to be found in his works. Two are presented by the renowned Venus-figures at Florence, and by the beautiful Danae at Naples. The Cambridge gallery contains the Venus in whose form the Princess Eboli is said to have been portrayed, playing the lute, and having Philip of Spain seated at her side. In the Bridgewater gallery are two representations of Diana in the bath,—the one having the story of Actæon, and the other discovering the guilt of Calisto; and in the National Gallery are a Bacchus and Ariadne, and also a good copy, from the original at Madrid, of Venus striving to hold back Adonis from the chase. To these we may add the Arming of Cupid, in the Borghese palace at Rome, in which he quietly permits Venus to bind his eyes, while another Cupid whispering leans on her shoulder, and two Graces bring forward quivers and bows.

It is to such a School of Painting, or to such a master of his art, that Shakespeare alludes, when, in the Induction scene to the Taming of the Shrew, Christopher Sly is served and waited on as a lord:—

Among Shakespeare’s gifts was also the power to appreciate the charms of melody and song. Their influence he felt, and their effect he most eloquently describes. He speaks of them with a sweetness, a gentleness, and force which must have had counterparts in his own nature. As in the Midsummer Night’s Dream, act ii. sc. 1, line 148, vol. ii. p. 215, when Oberon bids Puck to come to her,—

And again, in the Merchant of Venice, act v. sc. 1, lines 2 and 54, vol. ii. p. 360, how exquisite the description!—

Lorenzo’s discourse to Jessica is such as only a passion-warmed genius could conceive and utter:—

And Ferdinand, in the Tempest, act i. sc. 2, l. 387, vol. i, p. 20, after listening to Ariel’s song, “Come unto these yellow sands,” thus testifies to its power:—

Thus, from his sufficient command over the requisite languages, from his diligent reading in the literature of his country, translated as well as original, from his opportunities of frequent converse with the cultivated minds of his age, and still more from what we have shown him to have possessed,—accurate taste and both an intelligent and a warm appreciation of the principles and beauties of Imitative Art,—we conclude that Shakespeare found it a study congenial to his spirit and powers, to examine and apply, what was both popular and learned in its day,—the illustrations, by the graver’s art and the poet’s pen, of the proverbial wisdom which constitutes almost the essence of the Emblematical writers of the sixteenth century. To him, as to others, their works would be sources of interest and amusement; and even in hours of idleness many a sentiment would be gathered up to be afterwards almost unconsciously assimilated for the mind’s nurture and growth.

When we maintain that Shakespeare not unfrequently made use of the Emblem writers, we do not mean to imply that he was generally a direct copyist from them. This is seldom the case. But a word, a phrase, or an allusion, sufficiently demonstrates whence particular thoughts have been derived, and how they have been coloured and clothed. They have been gathered as flowers in a country-walk are gathered—one from this hedge-side, another from that, and a third from among the standing corn, and others from the margin of some murmuring stream; but all have their natural beauty heightened by the skill with which they are blended so as to impart gracefulness to the whole. Flora’s gems they may be, but the enwoven coronal borrows its chief charm from the artistic power and fitness with which its parts are arranged: break the thread, or cut the string with which Genius has bound them together, and they fall into inextricable confusion—a mass of disorder—no longer a pride and a joy: but let them remain, as a most excellent skill has placed them, and for ever could we gaze on their loveliness. A matchless beauty has been achieved, and all the more do we value it, because upon it there is also stamped eternal youth.

Symbola, 1679.

CHAPTER IV. THE KNOWLEDGE OF EMBLEM-BOOKS IN BRITAIN, AND GENERAL INDICATIONS THAT SHAKESPEARE WAS ACQUAINTED WITH THEM.

MONUMENTS, or memorial stones, with emblematical figures and characters carved upon them, are of ancient date in Britain as elsewhere—probably antecedent even to Christianity itself. Manuscripts, too, ornamented with many a symbolical device, carry us back several hundred years. These we may dismiss from consideration at the present moment, and simply take up printed books devoted chiefly or entirely to Emblems.

I.—Of printed Emblem-books in the earlier time down to 1598, when Willet’s Century of Sacred Emblems appeared, though there were several in the English language, there were only few of pure English origin. Watson and Barclay, in 1509, gave English versions of Sebastian Brant’s Fool-freighted Ship. Not later than 1536, nor earlier than 1517, The Dialogue of Creatures moralysed was translated “out of latyn in to our English tonge.” In 1549, at Lyons, The Images of the Old Testament, &c., were “set forthe in Ynglishe and Frenche;” and in 1553, from the same city, Peter Derendel gave in English metre The true and lyvely historyke Portreatures of the woll Bible.

The Workes of Sir Thomas More Knyght, sometyme Lorde Chauncellour of England, were published in small folio, London, 1557, and in them at the beginning (signature C ijv—C iiij) are inserted what the author names “nyne pageauntes,” which, as they existed in his father’s house about A.D. 1496, were certainly Emblems. To this list Sir Thomas North, in London, 1570, added The Morall Philosophie of Doni, “out of Italien;” Daniell, in 1585, The worthy Tract of Paulus Jovius, which Whitney, in 1586, followed up by A Choice of Emblemes, “Englished and moralized;” and Paradin’s Heroicall Devises were “Translated out of Latin into English,” London, 1591.

To vindicate something of an English origin for a few emblems at least, reference may again be made to the fact that about the year 1495 or 6, “Mayster Thomas More in his youth deuysed in hys fathers house in London, a goodly hangyng of fyne paynted clothe, with nyne pageauntes,^[73] and verses ouer of euery of those pageauntes: which verses expressed and declared, what the ymages in those pageauntes represented: and also in those pageauntes were paynted, the thynges that the verses ouer them dyd (in effecte) declare.” In 1592, Wyrley published at London The true use of Armories, &c.; soon after appeared Emblems by Thomas Combe, which, however, are no longer known to be in existence; and then, in 1598, Andrew Willet’s Sacrorvm Emblematvm Centvria vna, &c.,—“A Century of Sacred Emblems.” Guillim, in 1611, supplied A Display of Heraldry; and Peacham, in 1612, A Garden of Heroical Devices. There were, too, in MSS., several Emblem-works in English, some of which have since been edited and made known.

Yet we must not suppose that the knowledge of Emblem-books in Britain depended on those only of which an English version had been achieved. To men of culture, the whole series was open in almost its entire extent. James Hamilton, Earl of Arran, had resided in France, and in 1555, being high in the favour of Henry II., “was made captain of his Scotch life-guards.” A few years before, namely, in 1549, as we have mentioned, p. 108, Aneau’s French translation of Alciat’s Emblems had been dedicated to him as, “filz de tres noble Prince Jacque Due de Chastel le herault, Prince Gouverneur du Royaume d’Escoce.”

Among the rare books in the British Museum is Marquale’s Italian Version of Alciat’s Emblems, printed at Lyons in 1549; a copy of it, a very lovely book, in the original binding, bears on the back the royal crown, and at the foot the letters “E. VI. R.,”—Edwardus Sextus Rex; and, as he died in 1553, we thus have evidence at how early a date the work was known in England. To the young king it would doubtless be a book “for delight and for ornament.”

Of Holbein’s Imagines Mortis, Lyons, 1545, by George Æmylius, Luther’s brother-in-law, a copy now in the British Museum “was presented to Prince Edward by Dr. William Bill, accompanied with a Latin dedication, dated from Cambridge, 19th July, 1546, wherein he recommends the prince’s attention to the figures in the book, in order to remind him that all must die to obtain immortality; and enlarges on the necessity of living well. He concludes with a wish that the Lord will long and happily preserve his life, and that he may finally reign to all eternity with his most Christian father. Bill was appointed one of the king’s chaplains in ordinary, 1551, and was made the first Dean of Westminster in the reign of Elizabeth.”—Douce’s Holbein, Bohn’s ed., 1858, pp. 93, 94.

In 1548, Mary of Scotland was sent into France for her education (Rapin, ed. 1724, vol. vi. p. 30), and here imbibed the taste for, or rather knowledge of, Emblems, which afterwards she put into practice. To her son, in his fourteenth year, emblems were introduced by no less an authority than that of Theodore Beza. A copy indeed of the works of Alciatus was bound for him when he became King of England,—it is a folio edition, in six volumes or parts, and is still preserved in the British Museum; the royal arms are on the cover, front and back, and fleurs-de-lis in the corners. It was printed at Lyons in 1560, and possibly the Emblems in vol. vi., leaves 334–354, with their very beautiful devices, may have been the companions of his boyhood and early years. By the Emblem-works of Beza and of Alciat probably was laid the foundation of the king’s love for allegorical representations, which, under the name of masques, were provided by Jonson for the Court’s amusement. The king’s weakness in this respect is wittily set forth in the French epigram soon after his death (Rapin’s History, 4to, vol. vii. p. 259):—

To English noblemen, in 1608, Otho van Veen, from Antwerp, commends his Amorum Emblemata,—“Emblems of the Loves,”—with 124 excellent devices. Thus the dedication runs: “To the moste honorable and woerthie brothers, William Earle of Pembroke, and Philip Earle of Mountgomerie, patrons of learning and cheualrie.” In England, therefore, as in Scotland, there were eminent lovers of the Emblem literature.

But an acquaintance with that literature may be regarded as more spread abroad and increased when Emblem-books became the sources of ornamentation for articles of household furniture, and for the embellishment of country mansions. A remarkable instance is supplied from The History of Scotland, edition London, 1655, “By William Drummond of Hauthornden.” It is in a letter “To his worthy Friend Master Benjamin Johnson,” dated July 1, 1619, respecting some needle-work by Mary Queen of Scots, and shows how intimately she was acquainted with several of the Emblem-books of her day, or had herself attained the art of making devices. The whole letter, except a few lines at the beginning, is most interesting to the admirers of Emblems. Drummond thus writes:—

“I have been curious to find out for you the Impresaes and Emblemes on a Bed of State^[75] wrought and embroidered all with gold and silk by the late Queen Mary, mother to our sacred Sovereign, which will embellish greatly some pages of your Book, and is worthy your remembrance; the first is the Loadstone turning towards the pole, the word her Majesties name turned on an Anagram, Maria Stuart, sa virtu, m’attire, which is not much inferiour to Veritas armata. This hath reference to a Crucifix, before which with all her Royall Ornaments she is humbled on her knees most liuely, with the word, undique; an Impresa of Mary of Lorrain, her Mother, a Phœnix in flames, the word,^[76] en ma fin git mon commencement. The Impressa of an Apple-Tree growing in a Thorn, the word, Per vincula crescit. The Impressa of Henry the second, the French King, a Cressant, the word, Donec totum impleat orbem. The Impressa of King Francis the first, a Salamander crowned in the midst of Flames, the word, Nutrisco et extinguo. The Impressa of Godfrey of Bullogne, an arrow passing through three birds, the word, Dederit ne viam Casusve Deusve. That of Mercurius charming Argos, with his hundred eyes, expressed by his Caduceus, two Flutes, and a Peacock, the word, Eloquium tot lumina clausit. Two Women upon the Wheels of Fortune, the one holding a Lance, the other a Cornucopia; which Impressa seemeth to glaunce at Queen Elizabeth and herself, the word, Fortunæ Comites. The Impressa of the Cardinal of Lorrain her Uncle, a Pyramid overgrown with ivy, the vulgar word, Te stante virebo; a Ship with her Mast broken and fallen in the Sea, the word, Nusquam nisi rectum. This is for herself and her Son, a Big Lyon and a young Whelp beside her, the word, Unum quidem, sed Leonem. An embleme of a Lyon taken in a Net, and Hares wantonly passing over him, the word, Et lepores devicto insultant Leone. Cammomel in a garden, the word, Fructus calcata dat amplos. A Palm Tree, the word, Ponderibus virtus innata resistit. A Bird in a Cage, and a Hawk flying above, with the word, Il mal me preme et me spaventa a Peggio. A triangle with a Sun in the middle of a Circle, the word, Trino non convenit orbis. A Porcupine amongst Sea Rocks, the word, Ne volutetur. The Impressa of king Henry the eight, a Portculles, the word, altera securitas. The Impressa of the Duke of Savoy, the annunciation of the Virgin Mary, the word, Fortitudo ejus Rhodum tenuit. He had kept the Isle of Rhodes. Flourishes of Armes, as Helms, Launces, Corslets, Pikes, Muskets, Canons, the word, Dabit Deus his quoque finem. A Tree planted in a Church-yard environed with dead men’s bones, the word, Pietas revocabit ab orco. Ecclipses of the Sun and the Moon, the word, Ipsa sibi lumen quod invidet aufert, glauncing, as may appear, at Queen Elizabeth. Brennus Ballances, a sword cast in to weigh Gold, the word, Quid nisi Victis dolor! A Vine tree watred with Wine, which instead to make it spring and grow, maketh it fade, the word, Mea sic mihi prosunt. A wheel rolled from a Mountain in the Sea, the word, Piena di dolor voda de Sperenza. Which appeareth to be her own, and it should be, Precipitio senza speranza. A heap of Wings and Feathers dispersed, the word, Magnatum Vicinitas. A Trophie upon a Tree, with Mytres, Crowns, Hats, Masks, Swords, Books, and a Woman with a Vail about her eyes or muffled, pointing to some about her, with this word, Ut casus dederit. Three crowns, two opposite and another above in the Sea, the word, Aliamque moratur. The Sun in an Ecclipse, the word, Medio occidet Die.”

“I omit the Arms of Scotland, England, and France severally by themselves, and all quartered in many places of this Bed. The workmanship is curiously done, and above all value, and truely it may be of this Piece said, Materiam superabat opus.”^[77]

It would be tedious to verify, as might be done in nearly every instance, the original authors of these twenty-nine Impreses and Emblems. Several of them are in our own Whitney, several in Paradin’s Devises heroiques, and several in Dialogve des Devises d’armes et d’amovrs dv S. Pavlo Jovio, &c., 4to, A Lyon, 1561.

From the last named author we select as specimens two of the Emblems with which Queen Mary embellished the bed for her son;—the first is “the Impressa of King Francis the First,” who, as the Dialogue, p. 24, affirms, “changea la fierté des deuises de guerre en la douceur & ioyeuseté amoureuse,”—“And to signify that he was glowing with the passions of love,—and so pleasing were they to him, that he had the boldness to say that he found nourishment in them;—for this reason he chose the Salamander, which dwelling in the flames is not consumed.” (See woodcut next page.) The second, p. 25, is “the Impressa of Henry the second, the French King,” the son and successor of Francis in 1547. (See woodcut, p. 127.)

He had adopted the motto and device when he was Dauphin, and continued to bear them on his succession to the throne;—in the one case to signify that he could not show his entire worth until he arrived at the heritage of the kingdom; and in the other that he must recover for his kingdom what had been lost to it, and so complete its whole orb.

It may appear almost impossible, even on a “Bed of State,” to work twenty-nine Emblems and the arms of Scotland, England, and France, “severally by themselves and all quartered in many places of the bed,”—but a bed, probably of equal antiquity, was a few years since, if not now, existing at Hinckley in Leicestershire, on which the same number “of emblematical devices, and Latin mottoes in capital letters conspicuously introduced,” had found space and to spare. All these emblems are, I believe, taken from books of Shakespeare’s time, or before him; as, “An ostrich with a horseshoe in the beak,” the word, Spiritus durissima coquit; “a cross-bow at full stretch,” the word, Ingenio superat vires. “A hand playing with a serpent,” the word, Quis contra nos? “The tree of life springing from the cross on an altar,”^[78] the word, Sola vivit in illo. (See Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. lxxxi. pt. 2, p. 416, Nov. 1811.)

Paolo Jovio, 1561.

Paolo Jovio, 1561.

Of the use of Emblematical devices in the ornamenting of houses, it will be sufficient to give the instance recorded in “The History and Antiquities of Hawsted and Hardwick, in the county of Suffolk, by the Rev. Sir John Cullum, Bart:” the 2nd edition, royal 4to, London, 1813, pp. 159–165. This History makes it evident that in the reign of James I., if not earlier, Emblems were so known and admired as to have been freely employed in adorning a closet for the last Lady Drury. “They mark the taste of an age that delighted in quaint wit, and laboured conceits of a thousand kinds,” says Sir John; nevertheless, there were forty-one of them in “the painted closet” at Hawsted, and which, at the time of his writing, were put up in a small apartment at Hardwick. To all of them, as for King James’s bed, and for the “very antient oak wooden bedstead, much gilt and ornamented,” at Hinckley, there were a Latin motto and a device. Some of them we now present to the reader, adding occasionally to our author’s account a further notice of the sources whence they were taken:

Emblem 1. Ut parta labuntur,—“As procured they are slipping away.” “A monkey, sitting in a window and scattering money into the streets, is among the emblems of Gabriel Simeon:” it is also in our own English Whitney, p. 169, with the word, Malè parta malè delabuntur,—“Badly gotten, badly scattered.”

Emblem 5. Quò tendis?—“Whither art thou going?” “A human tongue with bats’ wings, and a scaly contorted tail, mounting into the air,” “is among the Heroical Devises of Paradin:” leaf 65 of edition Anvers, 1562.

Emblem 8. Jam satis,—“Already enough.” “Some trees, leafless, and torn up by the roots; with a confused landscape. Above, the sun, and a rainbow;” a note adds, “the most faire and bountiful queen of France Katherine used the sign of the rainbow for her armes, which is an infallible sign of peaceable calmeness and tranquillitie.”—Paradin. Paradin’s words, ed. 1562, leaf 38, are “Madame Catherine, treschretienne Reine de France, a pour Deuise l’Arc celeste, ou Arc en ciel: qui est le vrai signe de clere serenité & tranquilité de Paix.”

Emblem 20. Dum transis, time,—“While thou art crossing, fear.” “A pilgrim traversing the earth: with a staff, and a light coloured hat, with a cockle shell in it.” In Hamlet, act iv. sc. 5, l. 23, vol. viii. p. 129,—

“Or,” remarks Sir John Cullum, “as he is described in Greene’s Never too Late, 1610;”—

Emblem 24. Fronte nulla fides,—“No trustworthiness on the brow.” The motto with a different device occurs in Whitney’s Emblems, p. 100, and was adopted by him from the Emblems of John Sambucus; edition Antwerp, 1564, p. 177. The device, however, in “the painted closet” was “a man taking the dimensions of his own forehead with a pair of compasses;” “a contradiction,” inaptly remarks Sir J. Cullum, “to a fancy of Aristotle’s that the shape and several other circumstances, relative to a man’s forehead, are expressive of his temper and inclination.”

POVR CONGNOISTRE

VN HOMME.

Symeoni, 1561.

Upon this supposition Symeon,^[79] before mentioned, has invented an Emblem, representing a human head and a hand issuing out of a cloud, and pointing to it, with this motto, Frons hominem præfert,—“The forehead shows the man.”

Emblem 33. Speravi et perii,—“I hoped and perished;”—the device, “A bird thrusting its head into an oyster partly open.” A very similar sentiment is rather differently expressed by Whitney, p. 128, by Freitag, p. 169, and by Alciat, edition Paris, 1602, emb. 94, p. 437, from whom it was borrowed. Here the device is a mouse invading the domicile of an oyster, the motto, Captivus ob gulam,—“A prisoner through gluttony;” and the poor little mouse—

Now, since so many Emblems from various authors were gathered to adorn a royal bed,^[80] “a very antient oak wooden bed,” and “a lady’s closet,” in widely distant parts of Britain, the supposition is most reasonable that the knowledge of them pervaded the cultivated and literary society of England and Scotland; and that Shakespeare, as a member of such society, would also be acquainted with them. The facts themselves are testimonies of a generally diffused judgment and taste, by which Emblematic devices for ornaments would be understood and appreciated.

And the facts we have mentioned are not solitary. About the period in question, in various mansions of the two kingdoms, Device and Emblem were employed for their adorning. In 1619, close upon Shakespeare’s time, and most likely influenced by his writings, there was set up in the Ancient Hall of the Leycesters of Lower Tabley, Cheshire, a richly carved and very curious chimney-piece, which may be briefly described as emblematizing country pursuits in connection with those of heraldry, literature, and the drama. In high relief, on one of the upright slabs, is a Lucrece, as the poet represents the deed, line 1723,—

On the other slab is a Cleopatra, with the deadly creature in her hand, though not at the very moment when she addressed the asp;—act. v. sc. 2, l. 305, vol. ix. p. 151,—

The cross slab represents the hunting of stag and hare, which with the hounds have wonderfully human faces. Here might the words of Titus Andronicus, act. ii. sc. 2, l. 1, vol. vii. p. 456, be applied,—

The heraldic insignia of the Leycesters surmount the whole, but just below them, in a large medallion, is an undeniable Emblem, similar to one which in 1624 appeared in Hermann Hugo’s Pia Desideria, bk. i. emb. xv. p. 117; Defecit in dolore vita mea et anni mei in gemitibus (Psal. xxx. or rather Psal. xxxi. 10),—“My life is spent with grief, and my years with sighing.” Appended to Hugo’s device are seventy-six lines of Latin elegiac verses, and five pages of illustrative quotations from the Fathers; but the character of the Emblem will be seen from the device presented.

Drayton in his Barons’ Wars, bk. vi., published in 1598, shows how the knowledge of our subject had spread and was spreading; as when he says of certain ornaments,—

There is, however, no occasion to pursue any further this branch of our theme, except it may be by a short continuation or extension of our Period of time, to show how Milton’s greater Epic most curiously corresponds with the title-page of a Dutch Emblem-book, which appeared in 1642, several years before Paradise Lost was written. (See Plate X.) The book is, Jan Vander Veens Zinne-beelden, oft Adams Appel,—“John Vander Veen’s Emblems, or Adam’s Apple,”—presenting some Dutch doggerel lines, of which this English doggerel contains the meaning,—

And again,—

Singularly like to Milton’s Introduction (bk. i. lines 1–4),—

Plate 10

Title of “Adam’s Appel” Vander Veen 1642

Plate 11

Fall of Satan from Boissard’s “Theatrum Vitæ Humanæ,” 1596

With equal singularity appears in Boissard’s Theatrum Vitæ Humanæ,—“Theatre of Human Life,”—edition Metz, 1596, p. 19, the coincidence with Milton’s Fall of the rebel Angels. We have here pictured and described the Fall of Satan (see Plate XI.) almost as in modern days Turner depicted it, and as Milton has narrated the terrible overthrow (Paradise Lost, bk. vi.), when they were pursued

That same Theatre of Human Life, p. 1 (see Plate XIV.), also contains a most apt picture of Shakespeare’s lines, As You Like It, act. ii. sc. 7, l. 139, vol. ii. p. 409,—

The same notion is repeated in the Merchant of Venice, act. i. sc. 1, l. 77, vol. ii. p. 281, when Antonio says,—

In England, as elsewhere, emblematical carvings and writings preceded books of Emblems, that is, books in which the art of

the engraver and the genius of the poet were both employed to illustrate one and the same motto, sentiment, or proverbial saying. Not to repeat what may be found in Chaucer and others, Spenser’s Visions of Bellay,^[82] alluded to in the fac-simile reprint of Whitney, pp. xvi & xvii, needed only the designer and engraver to make them as perfectly Emblem-books as were the publications of Brant, Alciatus and Perriere. Those visions portray in words what an artist might express by a picture. For example, in Moxon’s edition, 1845, p. 438, iv.,—

Now what artist’s skill would not suffice from this description to delineate “the pillers of Iuorie,” “the chapters of Alabaster,” “a Victorie with golden wings,” and “the triumphing chaire, the auncient glorie of the Romane lordes;” and to make the whole a lively and most cunning Emblem?

FEBRVARIE.

Spenser, 1616.

In his Shepheards Calender, indeed, to each of the months Spenser appends what he names an “Emblem;” it is a motto, or device, from Greek, Latin, Italian, French, or English, expressive of the supposed leading idea of each Eclogue, and forming a moral to it. The folio edition of Spenser’s works, issued in 1616, gives woodcuts for each month, and so approaches very closely to the Emblematists of a former century. In the month “FEBRVARIE,” there is introduced a veritable word-picture of “the Oake and the Brier,” and also a pictorial illustration, with the sign of the Fishes in the clouds, to indicate the season of the year. The oak is described as “broughten to miserie:” l. 213,—

The Brier, “puffed up with pryde,” has his turn of adversity: l. 234,—

The whole Eclogue, or Fable, is rounded off by the curious Italian proverbs, to which Spenser gives the name of Emblems,—

i.e., “God, although he is very aged, makes his friends copies of himself,” makes them aged too; but the biting satire is added. “No old man is ever terrified by Jove.”

IVNE

Spenser, 1616.

The Emblem for June represents a scene which the poet does not describe; it is the field of the haymakers, with the zodiacal sign of the Crab, and appropriate to the characters of Hobbinoll and Colin Clout,— but it certainly does not translate into pictures what the poet had delineated in words of great beauty:

No more needs be said respecting the knowledge of Emblem-books in Britain, unless it be to give the remarks of Tod, the learned editor of Spenser’s works, edition 1845, p. x. “The Visions are little things, done probably when Spenser was young, according to the taste of the times for Emblems.^[83] The Theatre of Wordlings, I must add, evidently presents a series of Emblems.”

II. We will now state some of the general indications that Shakespeare was acquainted with Emblem-books, or at least had imbibed “the taste of the times.”

Here and there in Shakespeare’s works, even from the way in which sayings and mottoes, in Spanish, as well as in French and Latin, are employed, we have indications that he had seen and, it may be, had studied some of the Emblem-writers of his day, and participated of their spirit. Thus Falstaff’s friend, the ancient Pistol, 2 Henry IV. act. ii. sc. 4, l. 165, vol. iv. p. 405, quotes the doggerel line, as given in the note, Si fortuna me tormenta, il sperare me contenta,—“If fortune torments me, hope contents me,”—which doubtless was the motto on his sword, which he immediately lays down. As quoted, the line is Spanish; a slight alteration would make it Italian; but Douce’s conjecture appears well founded, that as Pistol was preparing to lay aside his sword, he read off the motto which was upon it. Such mottoes were common as inscriptions upon swords; and Douce, vol. i. pp. 452, 3, gives the drawing of one with the French line, “Si fortune me tourmente, L’esperance me contente.”

Douce, 1807.

He gives it, too, as a fact, that “Haniball Gonsaga being in the low-countries overthrowne from his horse by an English captaine and commanded to yeeld himselfe prisoner, kist his sword, and gave it to the Englishman, saying, ‘Si fortuna me tormenta, il speranza me contenta.’” Allow that Shakespeare served in the Netherlands, and we may readily suppose that he had heard the motto from the very Englishman to whom Gonsaga had surrendered.

The Clown in Twelfth Night, act. i. sc. 5, l. 50, vol. iii. p. 234, replies to the Lady Olivia ordering him as a fool to be taken away,—“Misprision in the highest degree! Lady, cucullus non facit monachum, [—it is not the hood that makes the monk,]—that’s as much to say as I wear not motley in my brain.” The saying is one which might appropriately adorn any Emblem-book of the day;—and the motley-wear receives a good illustration from a corresponding expression in Whitney, p. 81:

So, during Cade’s rebellion, when the phrase is applied by Lord Say, in answer to Dick the butcher’s question, “What say you of Kent?” 2 Henry VI. act. iv. sc. 7, l. 49, vol. v. p. 197,—

or when falling under the attack of York on the field of St. Alban’s, Lord Clifford exclaims, La fin couronne les œuvres (2 Henry VI. act. v. sc. 2, l. 28, vol. v. p. 217); these again are instances after the methods of Emblem-writers; and if they were carried out, as might be done, would present all the characteristics of the Emblem, in motto, illustrative woodcut, and descriptive verses.

It is but an allusion, and yet the opening scene, act. i. sc. 1, l. 50, vol. ii. p. 280, of the Merchant of Venice might borrow that allusion from an expression of Alciatus, edition Antwerp, 1581, p. 92, Jane bifrons,—“two-headed Janus.” (See woodcut, p. 140.)

The friends of Antonio banter him for his sadness, and one of them avers,—

Alciat, 1581.

Even if Shakespeare understood no Latin, the picture itself, or a similar one, would be sufficient to give origin to the phrase “two-headed Janus.” He adopts the picture, but not one of the sentiments; these, however, he did not need: it was only as a passing illustration that he named Janus, and how the author described the god’s qualities was no part of his purpose.

Or if the source of the phrase be not in Alciatus, it may have been derived either from Whitney’s Choice of Emblemes, p. 108, or from Perriere’s Theatre des Bons Engins, Paris, 1539, emb. i., reproduced in 1866 to illustrate pl. 30 of the fac-simile reprint of Whitney. Perriere’s French stanza is to this effect:—

Another instance of Emblem-like delineation, or description, we have in King Henry V. act iii. sc. 7, lines 10–17, vol. iv. p. 549. Louis the Dauphin, praising his own horse, as if bounding from the earth like a tennis ball (see woodcut on next page), exclaims,—

“I will not change my horse with any that treads but on four pasterns. Ça, ha! he bounds from the earth, as if his entrails were hairs; le cheval volant, the Pegasus, chez les narines de feu! When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk: he trots the air; the earth sings when he touches it; the basest horn of his hoof is more musical than the pipe of Hermes.^[86]

Orl. He’s of the colour of the nutmeg.

Dau. And of the heat of the ginger. It is a beast for Perseus: he is pure air and fire; and the dull elements of earth and water never appear in him, but only in patient stillness, while his rider mounts him: he is indeed a horse; and all other jades you may call beasts.

Con. Indeed, my lord, it is a most absolute and excellent horse.

Dau. It is the prince of palfreys; his neigh is like the bidding of a monarch, and his countenance enforces homage.”

Bocchius, 1555.

This lively description suits well the device of a Paris printer, Christian Wechel, who, in 1540,^[87] dwelt “a l’enseigne du Cheval volant;” or that of Claude Marnius of Francfort, who, before 1602, had a similar trade-mark. At least three of Reusner’s Emblems, edition Francfort, 1581, have the same device; and the Dauphin’s paragon answers exactly to a Pegasus in the first Emblem, dedicated to Rudolph II., who, on the death of his father, Maximilian, became Emperor of Germany.

ΣΥΝ ΔΥΩ ΕΡΧΟΜΕΝΩ.

Non abſque Theſeo.

EMBLEMA I.

Reusner, 1581.

Ad Diuum Rudolphum Secundum

Cæſarem Romanum.

Here^[88] we have a Pegasus like that which Shakespeare praises; it has a warrior on its back, and bounds along, trotting the air. In other two of Reusner’s Emblems, the Winged Horse is standing on the ground, with Perseus near him; and in a third, entitled Principis boni imago,—“Portrait of a good prince,”—St. George is represented on a flying steed^[89] attacking the Dragon, and delivering from its fury the Maiden chained to a rock, that shadows forth a suffering and persecuted church. Shakespeare probably had seen these or similar drawings before he described Louis the Dauphin riding on a charger that had nostrils of fire.

The qualities of good horsemanship Shakespeare specially admired. Hence those lines in Hamlet, act iv. sc. 7, l. 84, vol. viii. p. 145,—

An emblem in Alciatus, edition 1551, p. 20, also gives the mounted warrior on the winged horse;—it is Bellerophon in his contest with the Chimæra. The accompanying stanza has in it an expression like one which the dramatist uses,—

Equally tasting of the Emblem-writers of Henry’s and Elizabeth’s reigns is that other proverb in French which Shakespeare places in the mouth of the Dauphin Louis. The subject is still his “paragon of animals,” which he prefers even to his mistress. See Henry V. act iii. sc. 7, l. 54, vol iv. p. 550. “I had rather,” he says, “have my horse to my mistress;” and the Constable replies, “I had as lief have my mistress a jade.”

“Dau. I tell thee, constable, my mistress wears his own hair.

Con. I could make as true a boast as that, if I had a sow to my mistress.

Dau. Le chien est retourné à son propre vomissement, et la truie lavée au bourbier. Thou makest use of anything.” [“The dog has returned to his vomit, and the sow that had been washed, to her mire.”]

Though the French is almost a literal rendering of the Latin Vulgate, 2 Pet. ii. 23, “Canis reversus ad suum vomitum: & sus lota in volutabro luti;” the whole conception is in the spirit of Freitag’s Mythologia Ethica, Antwerp, 1579, in which there is appended to each emblem a text of Scripture. A subject is chosen, a description of it given, an engraving placed on the opposite page, and at the foot some passage from the Latin vulgate is applied.

It may indeed be objected that, if Shakespeare was well acquainted with the Emblem literature it is surprising he should pass over, almost in silence, some Devices which partake peculiarly of his general spirit, and which would furnish suggestions for very forcible and very appropriate descriptions. Were we to examine his works thoroughly, we should discover some very remarkable omissions of subjects that appear to be exactly after his own method and perfectly natural to certain parts of his dramas. We may instance the almost total want of commendation for the moral qualities of the dog, whether “mastiff, greyhound, mongrel grim, hound or spaniel, brach or lym, or bob-tail tike, or trundle-tail.” The whole race is under a ban.

Perriere, 1539.

So industry, diligence, with their attendant advantages,—negligence, idleness, with their disadvantages, are scarcely alluded to, and but incidentally praised or blamed.

We may take one of Perriere’s Emblems, the 101st of Les Bons Engins, as our example, to show rather divergence than agreement,—or, at any rate, a different way of treating the subject.

Under the motto, Otiosi semper egentes,—“The idle always destitute,”—Whitney, p. 175, describes the same conditions,—

The idea is in some degree approached in the Chorus of Henry V. act i. l. 5, vol. iv. p. 491,—

The triumph of industry may also be inferred from the marriage blessing which Ceres pronounces in the Masque of the Tempest, act iv. sc. 1, l. 110, vol. i. p. 57,—

Yet for labour, work, industry, diligence, or by whatever other name the virtue of steady exertion may be known, there is scarcely a word of praise in Shakespeare’s abundant vocabulary, and of its effects no clear description. We are told in Cymbeline, act iii. sc. 6, l. 31, vol. ix. p. 240,—

And in contrasting the cares of royalty with the sound sleep of the slave, Henry V. (act iv. sc. 1, l. 256, vol iv. p. 564) declares that the slave,—

but the subject is never entered upon in its moral and social aspects, unless the evils which are ascribed by the Duke of Burgundy (Henry V. act v. sc. 2, l. 48, vol. iv. p. 596) to war, are also to be attributed to the negligence which war creates,—

Another instance we may give of that Emblem spirit, which often occurs in Shakespeare, and at the same time we may supply an example of Freitag’s method of illustrating a subject, and of appending to it a scriptural quotation. (See Mythologia Ethica, Antwerp, 1579, p. 29.) The instance is from King Lear, act ii. sc. 4, l. 61, vol. viii. p. 317, and the subject, Contraria industriæ ac desidiæ præmia—“The opposite rewards of industry and slothfulness.”

When Lear had arrived at the Earl of Gloster’s castle, Kent inquires,—

“How chance the king comes with so small a train?

Fool. An thou hadst been set i’ the stocks for that question, thou hadst well deserv’d it.

Gent. Why, fool?

Fool. We’ll set thee to school to an ant to teach thee there’s no labouring in the winter.”

That school we have presented to us in Freitag’s engraving (see woodcut on next page), and in the stanzas of Whitney, p. 159. There are the ne’er-do-well grasshopper and the sage schoolmaster of an ant, propounding, we may suppose, the wise saying, Dum ætatis ver agitur: consule brumæ,—“While the spring of life is passing, consult for winter,”—and the poet moralizes thus:

Contraria induſtriae ac deſidiæ præmia.

Freitag, 1579.

Propter frigus piger arare noluit: mendicabit ergo æſtate, & non dabitur illi.

Prouerb. 20, 4.

“The sluggard will not plow by reason of the cold; therefore shall he beg in harvest, and have nothing.”

Freitag’s representation makes indeed a change in the season at which the “ante, with longe experience wise,” administers her reproof; but it is equally the school for learning in the time of youth and strength, to provide for the infirmities of age and the adversities of fortune.

And more than similar in spirit to the Emblem writers which preceded, almost emblems themselves, are the whole scenes from the Merchant of Venice, act ii. sc. 7 and 9, and act iii. sc. 2, where are introduced the three caskets of gold, of silver, and of lead, by the choice of which the fate of Portia is to be determined,^[90]—

And when the caskets are opened, the drawings and the inscriptions on the written scrolls, which are then taken out, examined and read, are exactly like the engravings and the verses by which emblems and their mottoes are set forth. Thus, on unlocking the golden casket, the Prince of Morocco exclaims,—

The Prince of Arragon, also, on opening the silver casket, receives not merely a written scroll, as is represented in Symeoni’s “Distichi Morali,”—Moral Stanzas,—but what corresponds to the device or woodcut of the Emblem-book; “The portrait of a blinking idiot,” who presents to him “The schedule,” or explanatory rhymes,—

These Emblems of Shakespeare’s are therefore complete in all their parts; the mottoes, the pictures, “a carrion Death” and “a blinking idiot,” and the descriptive verses.

Coſi viuo Piacer conduce à morte.

Paradin, 1562.

The words of Portia (act. ii. sc. 9, l. 79, vol. ii. p. 319), when the Prince of Arragon says,—

are moreover a direct reference to the Emblems which occur in various authors. Les Devises Heroiqves, by Claude Paradin, Antwerp, 1562, contains the adjoining Emblem, Too lively a pleasure conducts to death.

And Giles Corrozet in his “Hecatomgraphie, C’est à dire, les descriptions de cent figures, &c.,”^[91] adopting the motto, War is sweet only to the inexperienced, presents, in illustration, a butterfly fluttering towards a candle.

La guerre doulce aux inexperimentez.

Corrozet, 1540.

Les Papillons ſe vont bruſler

A la chandelle qui reluyct.

Tel veult à la bataillé̩[e/]̩ aller

Qui ne ſcaict combien guerre nuyct.

“The Butterflies themselves are about to burn,

In the candle which still shines on and warms;

Such foolish, wish to battle fields to turn,

Who know not of the war, how much it harms.”

This device, in fact, was one extremely popular with the Emblem literati. Boissard and Messin’s Emblems, 1588, pp. 58, 59, present it to the mottoes, “Temerité dangereuse,” or Temere ac Pericvlose,—“rashly and dangerously.” Joachim Camerarius, in his Emblems Ex Volatilibus et Insectis (Nuremberg, 4to, 1596), uses it, with the motto, Brevis et damnosa Voluptas—“A short and destructive pleasure,”—and fortifies himself in adopting it by no less authorities than Æschylus and Aristotle. Emblemes of Love, with Verses in Latin, English, and Italian, by Otho Vænius, 4to, Antwerp, 1608, present Cupid to us, at p. 102, as watching the moths and the flames with great earnestness, the mottoes being, Brevis et damnosa voluptas,—“For one pleasure a thousand paynes,”—and Breue gioia,—“Brief the gladness.”

There is, too, on the same subject, the elegant device which Symeoni gives at p. 25 of his “Distichi Morali,” and which we repeat on the next page.

The subject is, Of Love too much; and the motto, “Too much pleasure leads to death,” is thus set forth, almost literally, by English rhymes:—

D’AMOR SOVERCHIO.

Giovio and Symeoni, 1561.

Il moderato amor ſi loda & prezza,

Ma il troppo apporta danno & diſhonore,

Et ſpeſſo manca nel ſouerchio ardore,

Qual ſemplice farfalla al lume auuezza.

Coſi piacer conduce à morte.

Now can there be unreasonableness in supposing that out of these many Emblem writers Shakespeare may have had some one in view when he ascribed to Portia the words,—

The opening of the third of the caskets (act. iii. sc. 2, l. 115, vol. ii. p. 328), that made of lead, is also as much an Emblem delineation as the other two, excelling them, indeed, in the beauty of the language as well as in the excellence of the device, a very paragon of gracefulness. “What find I here?” demands Bassanio; and himself replies,—

In these scenes of the casket, Shakespeare himself, therefore, is undoubtedly an Emblem writer; and there needs only the woodcut, or the engraving, to render them as perfect examples of Emblem writing as any that issued from the pens of Alciatus, Symeoni, and Beza. The dramatist may have been sparing in his use of this tempting method of illustration, yet, with the instances before us, we arrive at the conclusion that Shakespeare knew well what Emblems were. And surely he had seen, and in some degree studied, various portions of the Emblem literature which was anterior to, or contemporary with himself.

Cebes, ed. 1552. Motto from Plate

CHAPTER V. SIX DIRECT REFERENCES IN THE PERICLES TO BOOKS OF EMBLEMS, SOME OF THEIR DEVICES DESCRIBED, AND OF THEIR MOTTOES QUOTED.

SHAKESPEARE’S name, in three quarto editions, published during his lifetime, appears as author of the play of Pericles, Prince of Tyre; and if a decision be made that the authorship belongs to him, and that in the main the work was his composition, then our previous conjectures are changed into certainties, and we can confidently declare who were the Emblem writers he refers to, and can exhibit the very passages from their books which he has copied and adopted.

The early folio editions of the plays, those of 1623 and 1632, omit the Pericles altogether, but later editions restore it to a place among the works of Shakespeare. Dr. Farmer contends that the hand of the great dramatist is visible only in the last act; but others controvert this opinion, and maintain, though he was not the fabricator of the plot, nor the author of every dialogue and chorus, that his genius is evident in several passages.

In Knight’s Pictorial Shakspere, supplemental volume, p. 13, we are informed: “The first edition of Pericles appeared in 1609,”—several years before the dramatist’s death,—“under the following title,—‘The late and much admired play, called Pericles, Prince of Tyre, &c. By William Shakespeare: London, Glosson, 1609.’”

According to the Cambridge editors, vol. ix. p. i, Preface, “another edition was issued in the same year.” The publication was repeated in 1611, 1619, 1630 and 1635, so that at the very time when Shakespeare was living, his authorship was set forth; and after his death, while his friends and contemporaries were alive, the opinion still prevailed.

The conclusion at which Knight arrives, sup. vol. pp. 118, 119, is thus stated by him: “We advocate the belief that Pyrocles, or Pericles was a very early work of Shakspere in some form, however different from that which we possess.” And again, “We think that the Pericles of the beginning of the seventeenth century was the revival of a play written by Shakspere some twenty years earlier.... Let us accept Dryden’s opinion, that

The Cambridge editors, vol. ix. p. 10, ed. 1866, gave a firmer judgment:—“There can be no doubt that the hand of Shakespeare is traceable in many of the scenes, and that throughout the play he largely retouched, and even rewrote, the work of some inferior dramatist. But the text has come down to us in so maimed and imperfect a state that we can no more judge of what the play was when it left the master’s hand than we should have been able to judge of Romeo and Juliet, if we had only had the first quarto as authority for the text.”

Our own Hallam tells us,—“Pericles is generally reckoned to be in part, and only in part, the work of Shakespeare:” but with great confidence the critic Schlegel declares,—“This piece was acknowledged to be a work, but a youthful work of Shakespeare’s. It is most undoubtedly his, and it has been admitted into several later editions of his works. The supposed imperfections originate in the circumstance that Shakespeare here handled a childish and extravagant romance of the old poet Gower, and was unwilling to drag the subject out of its proper sphere. Hence he even introduces Gower himself, and makes him deliver a prologue in his own antiquated language and versification. This power of assuming so foreign a manner is at least no proof of helplessness.”

There are, then, strong probabilities that in the main the Pericles was Shakespeare’s own composition, or at least was adopted by him; it belongs to his early dramatic life, and at any rate it may be taken as evidence to show that the Emblem writers were known and made use of between 1589 and 1609 by the dramatists of England.

Books of Emblems are not indeed mentioned by their titles, nor so quoted in the Pericles as we are accustomed to do, by making direct references; they were a kind of common property, on which everyone might pasture his Pegasus or his Mule without any obligation to tell where his charger had been grazing. The allusions, however, are so plain, the words so exactly alike, that they cannot be misunderstood. The author was of a certainty acquainted with more than one Emblem writer, in more than one language, and Paradin, Symeoni, and our own Whitney may be recognised in his pages. We conclude that he had them before him, and copied from them when he penned the second scene of the Second Act of Pericles.

The Dialogue is between Simonides, king of Pentapolis, and his daughter, Thaisa, on occasion of the “triumph,” or festive pageantry, which was held in honour of her birthday. (Pericles, act. ii. sc. 2, lines 17–47, vol. ix. pp. 343, 344.)

As with the ornaments “in silk and gold,” which Mary Queen of Scotland worked on the bed of her son James, or with those in “the lady’s closet” at Hawsted, we trace them up to their originals, and pronounce them, however modified, to be derived from the Emblem-books of their age; so, with respect to the devices which the six knights bore on their shields, we conclude that these have their sources in books of the same character, or in the genius of the author who knew so well how to contrive and how to execute. Emblems beyond a doubt they are, though not engraved on our author’s page, as they were on the escutcheons of the knightly company. Take the device and motto of the gnats or butterflies and the candle; we trace them from Vænius, Camerarius, and Whitney, to Paradin, from Paradin to Symeoni, and from Symeoni to Giles Corrozet,—at every step we pronounce them Emblems,—and should pass the same judgment, though we could not trace them at all. It is the same with these devices in the Triumph Scene of Pericles; we discover the origin of some of them in Emblem works of, or before Shakespeare’s era,—and where we fail to discover, there we attribute invention, invention guided and perfected by masters in the art of fashioning pictures to portray thoughts by means of things. We will, however, in due order consider the devices and mottoes of these six knights who came to honour the king’s daughter.

The first knight is the Knight of Sparta,—

A motto almost identical belongs to an old family of Worcestershire, the Blounts, of Soddington, of which Sir Edward Blount, Bart., is, or was the representative; their motto is, Lux tua vita mea,—“Thy light, my life;”—but their crest is an armed foot in the sun, not a black Ethiop reaching towards him. There was a Sir Walter Blount slain on the king’s side at the battle of Shrewsbury, and whom, previous to the battle, Shakespeare represents as sent by Henry IV. with offers of pardon to Percy. (Henry IV. Pt. 1. act. iv. sc. 3, l. 30, vol. iv. p. 323.) A Sir James Blount is also briefly introduced in Richard III. act. v. sc. 2, l. 615. The name being familiar to Shakespeare, the motto also might be;—and by a very slight alteration he has ascribed it to the Knight of Sparta.

I have consulted a considerable number of books of Emblems published before the Pericles was written, but have not discovered either the device or “the word” exactly in the form given in the play. There is a near approach to the device in Reusner’s Emblems, printed at Francfort in 1581 (Emb. 7, lib. i. p. 9). A man is represented stretching forth his hand towards the meridian sun, and the device is surmounted by the motto, Sol animi virtus,—“Virtue the sun of the soul.” The elegiac verses which follow carry out the thought with considerable clearness,—

Among these lines is one to illustrate the first knight’s motto;

But Plautus, the celebrated comic poet of Rome, gives in his Asinaria, 3. 3. 24, almost the very words of the Spartan knight: Certe tu vita es mihi,—“Of a truth thou art life to me.”

The introduction of an Ethiop was not unusual with Shakespeare. In the Two Gentlemen of Verona (act. ii. sc. 6. l. 25, vol. i. p. 112), Proteus avers,—

and in Love’s Labour’s Lost (act. iv. sc. 3, l. 111, vol. ii. p. 144), Dumain reads these verses,—

A genius so versatile as that of Shakespeare, and capable of creating almost a whole world of imagination out of a single hint, might very easily accommodate to his own idea Reusner’s suggestive motto, and make it yield the light of love to the lover rather than to the reverend sage. Failing in identifying the exact source of the “black Ethiope reaching at the sun,” we may then not unreasonably suppose that Shakespeare himself formed the device, and fitted the Latin to it.

In the Emblem-books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Latin mottoes very greatly preponderated over those of other languages; and had Shakespeare confined himself to Latin, it might remain doubtful whether he knew anything of Emblem works beyond those of our own countrymen—Barclay and Whitney—and of the two or three translations into English from Latin, French, and Italian. But the quotation of a purely Spanish motto, that on the second knight’s device, Piu por dulzura que por fuerza,—“More by gentleness than by force” (act ii. sc. 2, l. 27),—shows that his reading and observation extended beyond mere English sources, and that with other literary men of his day he had looked into, if he had not studied, the widely-known and very popular writings of Alciatus and Sambucus among Latinists, of Francisco Guzman and Hernando Soto among Spaniards, of Gabriel Faerni and Paolo Giovio among Italians, and of Bartholomew Aneau and Claude Paradin among the French.

Shakespeare gives several snatches of French, as in Twelfth Night, act iii. sc. 1, l. 68, vol. iii. p. 265,—

and in Henry V. act iii. sc. 4; act iv. sc. 4 and 5; act v. sc. 2, vol. iv. pp. 538–540, 574–577, and 598–603: in the scenes between Katharine and Alice; Pistol and the French soldier taken prisoner; and Katharine and King Henry. Take the last instance,—

Appropriately also to the locality of the Taming of the Shrew (act i. sc. 2, l. 24, vol. iii. p. 23), Hortensio’s house in Padua, is the Italian quotation.

We find only two Spanish sentences, those already quoted,—one being Pistol’s motto on his sword, Si fortuna me tormenta sperato me contenta; the other, that of the Prince of Macedon, on his shield, Piu por dulzura que por fuerza.

Similar proverbs and sayings abound both in Cervantes, who died in 1616, the year of Shakespeare’s death, and in the Spanish Emblem-books of an earlier date. I have very carefully examined the Emblems of Alciatus, translated into Spanish in 1549, but the nearest approach to the motto of the Prince of Macedon is, Que mas puede la eloquençia que la fortaliza (p. 124),—“Eloquence rather than force prevails,”—which may be taken from Alciat’s 180th Emblem, Eloquentia fortitudine præstantior.

Other Spanish Emblem-books of that day are the Moral Emblems of Hernando de Soto, published at Madrid in 1599, and Emblems Moralized, of Don Sebastian Orozco, published in the year 1610, also at Madrid; but neither of these gives the words of the second knight’s device. Nor are they contained in the Moral Triumphs, as they are entitled, of Francisco Guzman, published in 1587, the year after Whitney’s work appeared. The Moral Emblems, too, of Juan de Horozco, are without them,—an octavo, published at Segovia in 1589.

But, although there has been no discovery of this Spanish motto in a Spanish Emblem-book, the exact literal expression of it is found in a French work of extreme rarity—Corrozet’s “Hecatomgraphie,” Paris, 1540. There, at Emblem 28, Plus par doulceur que par force,^[94]—“More by gentleness than by force,”—is the saying which introduces the old fable of the Sun and the Wind, and of their contest with the travellers. Appended are a symbolical woodcut and a French stanza,

Contre la froidure du vent,

L’homme ſe tient clos & ſe ſerre,

Mais le Soleil le plus ſouuent

Luy faict mettre ſa robé̩[e/]̩ à terre.

Plus par doulceur que par force.

Corrozet, 1540.

which may be pretty accurately rendered by the English quatrain,—

This comment in verse follows Corrozet’s Emblem,—

There is a brief allusion to this fable in King John (act iv. sc. 3, l. 155, vol. iv. p. 76), in the words of Philip, the half-brother of Faulconbridge,—

Moderata vis impotenti violentia potior,—

Freitag, 1579.

The same fable is given in Freitag’s “Mythologia Ethica,” Antwerp, 1579, p. 27. It is to a very similar motto,—

“Moderate force more powerful than impotent violence,”—to which are added, below the woodcut, two quotations from the Holy Scriptures,—

implying that not by the rigid exercise of authority, but by a sympathising spirit, the true faith will be carried onward unto victory.

Now, as the motto of the second knight existed in French, and, as we have seen, Emblem-books were translated into Spanish, the supposition is justifiable, though we have failed to trace out the very fact, that the author of the Pericles—Shakespeare, if you will—copied the words of the motto from some Spanish Emblem-book, or book of proverbs, that had come within his observation, and which applied the saying to woman’s gentleness subduing man’s harsher nature. Future inquirers will, perhaps, clear up this little mystery, and trace the very work in which the Spanish saying is original, Piu por dulzura que por fuerza.

We pass to the third, the fourth, and the fifth knights, with their “devices” and “words;” and to illustrate these we have almost a superabundant wealth of emblem-lore, from any portion of which Shakespeare may have made his choice. His materials may have come from some one of the various editions of Claude Paradin’s, or of Gabriel Symeoni’s “Devises Heroiqves,” which appeared at Lyons and Antwerp, in French and Italian, between the years 1557 and 1590; or, as the learned Francis Douce supposes, in his Illustrations of Shakspere, pp. 302, 393, the dramatist may have seen the English translation of these authors, which was published in London in 1591, or, with greater probability, as some are inclined to say, he may have used the emblems of our countryman, Geffrey Whitney. Were it not that Daniell’s translation, in 1585, of The Worthy Tract of Paulus Jovius is without plates, we should include this in the number.

Of the devices in question, Whitney’s volume contains two, and the other works the three; but between certain expressions of Whitney’s and those of the Pericles, the similarity is so great, that the evidence of circumstance inclines, I may say decidedly inclines, to the conclusion that for two out of the three emblems referred to, Shakespeare was indebted to his fellow Elizabethan poet, and not to a foreign source.

From his use of Spanish and French mottoes, as well as Latin, it is evident that Shakespeare, no more than Spenser, needed the aid of translations to render the emblem treasures available to himself; and if, as some maintain,^[95] the Pericles was in existence previous to the year 1591, it could not have been that use was made of the English translation of that date of the “Devises Heroiqves,” by P. S.; it remains, therefore, that for two out of the three emblems he must either have employed one of the original editions of Lyons and of Antwerp, or have been acquainted with our Whitney’s Choice of Emblemes, and have obtained help from them; and for the third emblem he must have gone to the French or Italian originals.

The third knight, named of Antioch, has for his device “a wreath of chivalry,”—

i. e., “The crown at the triumphal procession has carried me onward.” On the 146th leaf of Paradin’s “Devises Heroiqves,” edition Antwerp, 1562, the wreath and the motto are exactly as Shakespeare describes them. But Paradin gives a long and interesting account of the laurel-wreath, and of the high value accorded to it in Roman estimation. “It was,” as that author remarks, “the grandest recompense, or the grandest reward which the ancient Romans could think of to offer to the Chieftains over armies, to Emperors, Captains, and victorious Knights.”

Me pompæ prouexit apex.

Paradin, 1562.

To gratify the curiosity which some may feel respecting this subject, I add the whole of the original.

“La plus grande recompense, ou plus grãd loyer que les antiques Rommains estimassent faire aus Chefz d’armee, Empereurs, Capitaines, et Cheualiers victorieux, c’estoit de les gratifier & honnorer (selon toutefois leurs merites, estats, charges, & degrez) de certaines belles Couronnes: qui generalemẽt (à cette cause) furent apellees Militaires. Desquelles (pour auoir estées indice & enseignes de prouesse & vertu) les figures des principales & plus nobles, sont ci tirees en deuises: tant a la louange & memoire de l’antique noblesse, que pareillement à la recreation, consolation, & esperance de la moderne, aspirãt & desirãt aussi de paruenir aus gages & loyers apartenãs & dediez aus defenseurs de la recommendable Republique. La premiere donques mise en reng, representera la Trionfale: laquelle estant tissue du verd Laurier, auec ses bacques, estoit donnée au Trionfateur, auquel par decret du Senat, estoit licite de trionfer parmi la vile de Romme, sur chariot, comme victorieus de ses ennemis. Desquels neantmoins lui conuenoit deuant la pompe, faire aparoir de la deffaite, du nombre parfait de cinq mile, en vne seule bataille. La susdite Couronne trionfale, apres long trait de temps (declinant l’Empire) fut commẽcee à estre meslee, & variée de Perles & pierrerie, & puis entierement changée de Laurier naturel en Laurier buriné, & enleué, sus vn cercle d’or: comme se void par les Medailles, de plusieurs monnoyes antiques.”^[96]

Shakespeare does not add a single word of explanation, or of amplification, which he might be expected to have done, had he used an English translation; but simply, and without remark, he adopts the emblem and its motto, as is natural to anyone who, though not unskilled in the language by which they are expressed, is not perfectly at home in it.

Of chivalry, however, he often speaks,—“of chivalrous design of knightly trial.” To Bolingbroke and Mowbray wager of battle is appointed to decide their differences (Richard II. act i. sc. 1, l. 202, vol. iv. p. 116), and the king says,—

And (vol. iv. p. 137) John of Gaunt declares of England’s kings; they were,—

But in the case of the fourth and fifth knights, it is not the simple adoption of a device which we have to consider; the very ideas, almost the very phrases in which those ideas were clothed, have also been given, pointing out that the Dramatist had before him something more than explanations in an unfamiliar tongue.

The device of the fourth knight is both described and interpreted,—

Thus presented in Symeoni’s “Tetrastichi Morali,” edition Lyons, 1561, p. 35,—

SIGNOR DI S.

VALIER.

Symeoni, 1561 (diminished copy).

An Italian stanza explains the device,—

The sense of which we now endeavour to give,—

Symeoni (from edition Lyons, 1574, p. 200) adds this little piece of history:—

“In the battle of the Swiss, routed near Milan by King Francis, M. de Saint Valier, the old man, father of Madame the Duchess de Valentinois,^[97] and captain of a hundred gentlemen of the king’s house, bore a standard, whereon was painted a lighted torch with the head downward, on which flowed so much wax as would extinguish it, with this motto ‘Qvi me alit, me extingvit,’ imitating the emblem of the king his master; that is, ‘Nvtrisco et extingvo.’ It is the nature of the wax, which is the cause of the torch burning when held upright, that with the head downward it should be extinguished. Thus he wished to signify, that as the beauty of a lady whom he loved nourished all his thoughts, so she put him in peril of his life. See still this standard in the church of the Celestins at Lyons.”^[98]

Paradin, who confessedly copies from Symeoni, agrees very nearly with this account, but gives the name of the Duchess “Diane de Poitiers,” and omits mentioning “the emblem of the king.”

Qui me alit, me extinguit.

Paradin, 1562.

As stated in the fac-simile Reprint of Whitney’s Emblemes, p. 302, Douce in his Illustrations of Shakespeare, pp. 302, 393, advances the opinion that the translation of Paradin into English, 1591, by P. S., was the source of Shakespeare’s torch-emblem; “but it is very note-worthy that the torch in the English translation is not a torch ‘that’s turned upside down,’ but one held uninverted, with the flame naturally ascending. This contrariety to Shakespeare’s description seems fatal therefore to the translator’s claim.” P. S., however, renders the motto, “He that nourisheth me, killeth me;” and so may put in a claim to the suggestion of the line,—

Let us next take Whitney’s stanza of six lines to the same motto and the same device, p. 183; premising that the very same wood-block appears to have been used for the Paradin in 1562, and for the Whitney in 1586.

Now, comparing together Symeoni, Paradin, Whitney, and Shakespeare, as explanatory of the fourth knight’s emblem, we can scarcely fail to perceive in the Pericles a closer resemblance, both of thought and expression, to Whitney than to the other two. Whitney wrote,—

which the Pericles thus amplifies:

We conclude, therefore, from this instance, that Whitney’s Choice of Emblemes was known to the author of the Pericles, and that in this instance he has simply carried out the idea which was there suggested to him.

A slight allusion to this same device of the burning torch is made in 3 Henry VI. (act iii. sc. 2, l. 51, vol. v. p. 281), when Clarence remarks,—

but a very distinct one in Hamlet’s words (act iii. sc. 4, l. 82, vol. viii. p. 112),—

The “Amorvm Emblemata,”—Emblemes of Loue,—with verses in Latin, English, and Italian: 4to, Antverpiæ, M.DC.IIX., gives the same variation in the reading of the motto as Shakespeare does, namely, “Quod” for “Qui;” and as Daniell had done in The Worthy Tract of Paulus Jouius, in 1585, by substituting “Quod me alit” for “Qui me alit.”^[99] The latter is the reading in Paulus Jovius himself,—and is also found in some of the early editions of this play. (See Cambridge Shakespeare, vol. ix. p. 343.) The Amorum Emblemata, by Otho Vænius, named above, and dated 1608—one year before “Pericles, Prince of Tyre,” was first published, in quarto—has the Latin motto, “Qvod nvtrit, extingvit,” Englished and Italianised as follows:

At a much earlier date, 1540, Corrozet’s Hecatomgraphie gives the inverted torch as a device, with the motto, “Mauluaise nourriture,”—

DEVISES

Sic spectanda fides.

Paradin, 1562.

But the “device” and “the word” of the fifth knight,—

“So is fidelity to be proved,”—occur most exactly in Paradin’s “Devises Heroiques,” edition 1562, leaf 100, reverse; they are here figured.

Paradin often presents an account of the origin and appropriation of his emblems, but, in this instance, he offers only an application. “If, in order to prove fine gold, or other metals, we bring them to the touch, without trusting to their glitter or their sound;—so, to recognise good people and persons of virtue, it is needful to observe the splendour of their deeds, without dwelling upon their mere talk.”^[100]

The narrative which Paradin neglects to give may be supplied from other sources. This Emblem or Symbol is, in fact, that which was appropriated to Francis I. and Francis II., kings of France from 1515 to 1560, and also to one of the Henries—probably Henry IV. The inscription on the coin, according to Paradin and Whitney’s woodcut, is “Franciscvs Dei Gratia Fran. Rex;” this is for Francis I.; but in the Hierographia Regvm Francorvm^[101] (vol. i. pp. 87 and 88), the emblem is inscribed, “Franciscus II. Valesius Rex Francorum XXV. Christianissimus.” A device similar to Paradin’s then follows, and the comment, Coronatum aureum nummum, ad Lydium lapidem dextra hæc explicat & sic, id est, duris in rebus fidem explorandam docet,—“This right hand extends to the Lydian stone a coin of gold which is wreathed around, and so teaches that fidelity in times of difficulty is put to the proof.” The coin applied to the touchstone bears the inscription, “Franciscvs II. Francorv. Rex.” An original drawing,^[102] by Crispin de Passe, in the possession of Sir William Stirling Maxwell, Bart., of Keir, presents the inscription in another form, “Henricvs, D. G. Francorv. Rex.” The first work of Crispin de Passe is dated 1589, and Henry IV. was recognised king of France in 1593. His portrait, and that of his queen, Mary of Medicis, were painted by De Passe; and so the Henry on the coin in the drawing above alluded to was Henry of Navarre.

The whole number of original drawings at Keir, by Crispin de Passe, is thirty-five, of the size of the following plate,—No 27 of the series.

Crispin de Passe, about 1595.^[103]

The mottoes in Emblemata Selectiora are,—

Very singular is the correspondence of the last two mottoes to a scene in Timon of Athens (act iv. sc. 3, lines 25, 377, vol. vii. pp. 269, 283). Timon digging in the wood finds gold, and asks,—

and afterwards, when looking on the gold, he thus addresses it,—

The Emblem which Shakespeare attributes to the fifth knight is fully described by Whitney (p. 139), with the same device and the same motto, Sic spectanda fides,^[104]—

If, in the use of this device, and in their observations upon it, Paradin, either in the original or in the English version, and Whitney be compared with the lines on the subject in Pericles, it will be seen “that Shakespeare did not derive his fifth knight’s device either from the French emblem or from its English translator, but from the English Whitney which had been lately published. Indeed, if Pericles were written, as Knight conjectures, in Shakespeare’s early manhood, previous to the year 1591, it could not be the English translation of Paradin which furnished him with the three mottoes and devices of the Triumph Scene.”

To the motto, “Amor certvs in re incerta cernitvr,”—Certain love is seen in an uncertain matter,—Otho Vænius, in his Amorum Emblemata, 4to, Antwerp, 1608, represents two Cupids at work, one trying gold in the furnace, the other on the touchstone. His stanzas, published with an English translation, as if intended for circulation in England, may, as we have conjectured, have been seen by Shakespeare before 1609, when the Pericles was revived. They are to the above motto,—

The same metaphor of attesting characters, as gold is proved by the touchstone or by the furnace, is of frequent occurrence in Shakespeare’s undoubted plays; and sometimes the turn of the thought is so like Whitney’s as to give good warrant for the supposition, either of a common original, or that Shakespeare had read the Emblems of our Cheshire poet and made use of them.

King Richard III. says to Buckingham (act iv. sc. 2, l. 8, vol. v. p. 580),—

And in Timon of Athens (act iii. sc. 3, l. 1, vol. vii. p. 245), when Sempronius observes to a servant of Timon’s,—

The servant immediately replies,—

Isabella, too, in Measure for Measure (act ii. sc. 2, l. 149, vol. i. p. 324), most movingly declares her purpose to bribe Angelo, the lord-deputy,—

In the dialogue from King John (act iii. sc. 1, l. 96, vol. iv. p. 37) between Philip of France and Constance, the same testing is alluded to. King Philip says,—

But Constance answers with great severity,—

One instance more shall close the subject;—it is from the Coriolanus (act iv. sc. 1, l. 44, vol. vi. p. 369), and contains a very fine allusion to the testing of true metal; the noble traitor is addressing his mother Volumnia, his wife Virgilia, and others of his kindred,—

So beautifully and so variously does the great dramatist carry out that one thought of making trial of men’s hearts and characters to learn the metal of which they are made.

To finish our notices and illustrations of the Triumph Scene in Pericles, there remain to be considered the device and the motto of the sixth—the stranger knight—who “with such a graceful courtesy delivered,”—

and on which the remark is made by Simonides,—

With these I have found nothing identical in any of the various books of Emblems which I have examined; indeed, I cannot say that I have met with anything similar. The sixth knight’s emblem is very simple, natural, and appropriate; and I am most of all disposed to regard it as invented by Shakespeare himself to complete a scene, the greater part of which had been accommodated from other writers.

Illicitum non ſperandum.

Whitney, 1586.

“Spes ſimul & Nemeſis noſtris altaribus adſunt,

Scilicet vt ſperes non niſi quod liceat.”

The unlawful thing not to be hoped for.

“Here Nemesis, and Hope: our deedes doe rightlie trie,

Which warnes vs, not to hope for that, which justice doth denie.”

Yet the sixth device and motto need not remain without illustration. Hope is a theme which Emblematists could not possibly omit. Alciatus gives a series of four Emblems on this virtue,—Emblems 43, 44, 45, and 46; Sambucus, three, with the mottoes “Spes certa,” “In spe fortitudo,” and “Spes aulica;” and Whitney, three from Alciatus (pp. 53, 137, and 139); but none of these can be accepted as a proper illustration of the In hac spe vivo. Their inapplicability may be judged of from Alciat’s 46th Emblem, very closely followed by Whitney (p. 139).

In the spirit, however, if not in the words of the sixth knight’s device, the Emblem writers have fashioned their thoughts. From Paradin’s “Devises Heroiqves,” so often quoted, we select two devices (fol. 30 and 152) illustrative of our subject. The one, an arrow issuing from a tomb, on which is the sign of the cross, and having verdant shoots twined around it, was the emblem which Madame Diana of Poitiers adopted to express her strong hope of a resurrection from the dead;^[106] and the same hope is also shadowed forth by ears of corn growing out of a collection of dry bones, and ripening and shedding their seed.

Paradin, 1562.

The first, Sola viuit in illo,—“Alone on that,” i.e., on the cross, “she lives,”—we now offer with Paradin’s explanation; “L’esperance que Madame Diane de Poitiers Illustre Duchesse de Valentinois, a de la resurrection, & que son noble esprit, contemplant les cieus en cette view, paruiendra en l’autre après la mort: est possible signifié par sa Deuise, qui est d’vn Sercueil, ou tombeau, duquel sort vn trait, acompagné de certains syons verdoyans.” i.e.,—“The hope which Madame Diana of Poitiers, the illustrious Duchess de Valentinois, has of the resurrection, and which her noble spirit, contemplating the heavens in this life, will arrive at in the other, after death: it is really signified by her Device, which is a Sepulchre or tomb, from which issues an arrow, accompanied by certain verdant shoots.”

The motto of the second is more directly to the purpose, Spes altera vitæ,—“Another hope of life,” or “The hope of another life,”—and its application is thus explained by Paradin (leaf 151 reverso),—“Les grains des Bleds, & autres herbages, semées & mortifiées en terre, se reuerdoyent, & prennent nouuel accroissement: aussi les corps humains tombãs par Mort, seront relevés en gloire, par generale resurrection.”—i.e., “The seeds of wheat, and other herbs, sown and dying in the ground, become green again, and take new growth: so human bodies cast down by Death will be raised again in glory, by the general resurrection.”

We omit the woodcut which Paradin gives, and substitute for it the 100th Emblem, part i. p. 102, from Joachim Camerarius, edition, 1595, which bears the very same motto and device.

SPES ALTERA VITÆ.

Camerarius, 1595.

“Securus moritur, qui scit se morte renasci:

Non ea mors dici, sed noua vita potest.”

“Fearless doth that man die, who knows

From death he again shall be born;

We never can name it as death,—

’Tis new life on eternity’s morn.”

A sentence or two from the comment may serve for explanation; “The seeds and grains of fruits and herbs are thrown upon the earth, and as it were entrusted to it; after a certain time they spring up again and produce manifold. So also our bodies, although already dead, and destined to burial in the earth, yet at the last day shall arise, the good to life, the wicked to judgment.”... “Elsewhere it is said, One Hope survives, doubtless beyond the grave.”^[107]

“Mort vivifiante,” of Messin, In Morte Vita, of Boissard, edition 1588, pp. 38, 39, also receive their emblematical representation, from wheat growing among the signs of death.

At present we must be content to say that the source of the motto and device of the sixth knight has not been discovered. It remains for us to conjecture, what is very far from being an improbability, that Shakespeare had read Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar, published in 1579, and from the line, on page 364 of Moxon’s edition, for January (l. 54),—

and from the Emblem, as Spenser names it, Anchora speme,—“Hope is my anchor,”—did invent for himself the sixth knight’s device, and its motto, In hac spe vivo,—“In this hope I live.” The step from applying so suitably the Emblems of other writers to the construction of new ones would not be great; and from what he has actually done in the invention of Emblems in the Merchant of Venice he would experience very little trouble in contriving any Emblem that he needed for the completion of his dramatic plans.

The Casket Scene and the Triumph Scene then justify our conclusion that the correspondencies between Shakespeare and the Emblem writers which preceded him are very direct and complete. It is to be accepted as a fact that he was acquainted with their works, and profited so much from them, as to be able, whenever the occasion demanded, to invent and most fittingly illustrate devices of his own. The spirit of Alciat was upon him, and in the power of that spirit he pictured forth the ideas to which his fancy had given birth.

Horapollo, ed. 1551.

CHAPTER VI. CLASSIFICATION OF THE CORRESPONDENCIES AND PARALLELISMS OF SHAKESPEARE WITH EMBLEM WRITERS. — Section I. HISTORICAL EMBLEMS. — Section II. HERALDIC EMBLEMS, OR EMBLEMS APPLIED TO HERALDRY. — Section III. EMBLEMS FOR MYTHOLOGICAL CHARACTERS. — Section IV. EMBLEMS ILLUSTRATIVE OF FABLES. — Section V. EMBLEMS IN CONNEXION WITH PROVERBS. — Section VI. EMBLEMS FROM FACTS IN NATURE, AND FROM THE PROPERTIES OF ANIMALS. — Section VII. EMBLEMS FOR POETIC IDEAS. — Section VIII. MORAL AND ÆSTHETIC EMBLEMS.

HAVING established the facts that Shakespeare invented and described Emblems of his own, and that he plainly and palpably adopted several which had been designed by earlier authors, we may now, with more consistency, enter on the further labour of endeavouring to trace to their original sources the various hints and allusions, be they more or less express, which his sonnets and dramas contain in reference to Emblem literature. And we may bear in mind that we are not now proceeding on mere conjecture; we have dug into the virgin soil and have found gold that can bear every test, and may reasonably expect, as we continue our industry, to find a nugget here and a nugget there to reward our toil.

But the correspondencies and parallelisms existing in Shakespeare between himself and the earlier Emblematists are so numerous, that it becomes requisite to adopt some system of arrangement, or of classification, lest a mere chaos of confusion and not the symmetry of order should reign over our enterprise. And as “all Emblemes for the most part,” says Whitney to his readers, “maie be reduced into these three kindes, which is Historicall, Naturall, & Morall,” we shall make that division of his our foundation, and considering the various instances of imitation or of adaptation to be met with in Shakespeare, shall arrange them under the eight heads of—1, Historical Emblems; 2, Heraldic Emblems; 3, Emblems of Mythological Characters; 4, Emblems illustrative of Fables; 5, Emblems in connexion with Proverbs; 6, Emblems from Facts in Nature, and from the Properties of Animals; 7, Emblems for Poetic Ideas; and 8, Moral and Æsthetic, and Miscellaneous Emblems.

AS soon as learning revived in Europe, the great models of ancient times were again set up on their pedestals for admiration and for guidance. Nearly all the Elizabethan authors, certainly those of highest fame, very frequently introduce, or expatiate upon, the worthies of Greece and Rome,—both those which are named in the epic poems of Homer and Virgil, and those which are within the limits of authentic history. It seemed enough to awaken interest, “to point a moral, or adorn a tale,” that there existed a record of old.

Shakespeare, though cultivating, it may be, little direct acquaintance with the classical writers, followed the general practice. He has built up some of the finest of his Tragedies, if not with chorus, and semi-chorus, strophe, anti-strophe, and epode, like the Athenian models, yet with a wonderfully exact appreciation of the characters of antiquity, and with a delineating power surprisingly true to history and to the leading events and circumstances in the lives of the personages whom he introduces. From possessing full and adequate scholarship, Giovio, Domenichi, Claude Mignault, Whitney, and others of the Emblem schools, went immediately to the original sources of information. Shakespeare, we may admit, could do this only in a limited degree, and generally availed himself of assistance from the learned translators of ancient authors. Most marvellously does he transcend them in the creative attributes of high genius: they supplied the rough marble, blocks of Parian perchance, and a few tools more or less suited to the work; but it was himself, his soul and intellect and good right arm, which have produced almost living and moving forms,—

For Medeia, one of the heroines of Euripides, and for Æneas and Anchises in their escape from Troy, Alciat (Emblem 54), and his close imitator Whitney (p. 33), give each an emblem.

To the first the motto is,—

similar, as a counterpart, to the Saviour’s words (Luke xvi. 12), “If ye have not been faithful in that which is another man’s, who shall give you that which is your own.”

The device is,—

Alicat, 1581.

with the following Latin elegiacs,—

Which Whitney (p. 33) considerably amplifies,—

And to the same purport, from Alciat’s 193rd Emblem, are Whitney’s lines (p. 29),—

The stanza of his 194th Emblem is adapted by Alciat, and by Whitney after him (p. 163), to the motto,—

Alicat, 1581.

The two emblems of Medeia and of Æneas and Anchises, Shakespeare, in 2 Henry VI. (act. v. sc. 2, l. 45, vol. v. p. 218), brings into close juxta-position, and unites by a single description; it is, when young Clifford comes upon the dead body of his valiant father, stretched on the field of St. Albans, and bears it lovingly on his shoulders. With strong filial affection he addresses the mangled corpse,—

On the instant the purpose of vengeance enters his mind, and fiercely he declares,—

Then suddenly there comes a gush of feeling, and with most exquisite tenderness he adds,—

The same allusion, in Julius Cæsar (act. i. sc. 2, l. 107, vol. vii. p. 326), is also made by Cassius, when he compares his own natural powers with those of Cæsar, and describes their stout contest in stemming “the troubled Tyber,”—

Aneau, 1552.

Progne, or Procne, Medeia’s counterpart for cruelty, who placed the flesh of her own son Itys before his father Tereus, is represented in Aneau’s “Picta Poesis,” ed. 1552, p. 73, with a Latin stanza of ten lines, and the motto, “Impotentis Vindictæ Foemina,”—The Woman of furious Vengeance. In the Titus Andronicus (act. v. sc. 2, l. 192, vol. vi. p. 522) the fearful tale of Progne enters into the plot, and a similar revenge is repeated. The two sons of the empress, Chiron and Demetrius, who had committed atrocious crimes against Lavinia the daughter of Titus, are bound, and preparations are made to inflict such punishment as the world’s history had but once before heard of. Titus declares he will bid their empress mother, “like to the earth swallow her own increase.”

’Tis a fearful scene, and the father calls,—

A character from Virgil’s Æneid (bk. ii. lines 79–80; 195–8; 257–9),^[109] frequently introduced both by Whitney and Shakespeare, is that of the traitor Sinon, who, with his false tears and lying words, obtained for the wooden horse and its armed men admission through the walls and within the city of Troy. Asia, he averred, would thus secure supremacy over Greece, and Troy find a perfect deliverance. It is from the “Picta Poesis” of Anulus (p. 18), that Whitney (p. 141) on one occasion adopts the Emblem of treachery, the untrustworthy shield of Brasidas,—

Perfidvs familiaris,—

“The faithless friend.”

Aneau, 1552.

Per medium Brasidas clypeum traiectus ab hoſte:

Quóque foret læſus ciue rogante modum.

Cui fidebam (inquit) penetrabilis vmbo fefellit.

Sic cvi ſæpe fides credita: proditor eſt.

Thus rendered in the Choice of Emblemes,—

Sambucus, 1564.

And again, adopting the Emblem of John Sambucus, edition Antwerp, 1564, p. 184,^[110] and the motto,

with the exemplification of the Elephant and the undermined tree, Whitney writes (p. 150),—

Freitag’s “Mythologia ethica,” pp. 176, 177, sets forth the well-known fable of the Countryman and the Viper, which after receiving warmth and nourishment attempted to wound its benefactor. The motto is,—

Freitag, 1579.

“Qui reddit mala pro bonis, non recedet malum de domo eius.”—Prouerb, 17, 13.

“Whoso rewardeth evil for good, evil shall not depart from his house.”

Nicolas Reusner, also, edition Francfort, 1581, bk. ii. p. 81, has an Emblem on this subject, and narrates the whole fable,—

In several instances in his historical plays, Shakespeare very expressly refers to this fable. On hearing that some of his nobles had made peace with Bolingbroke, in Richard II. (act. iii. sc. 2, l. 129, vol. iv. p. 168), the king exclaims,—

In the same drama (act. v. sc. 3, l. 57, vol. iv. p. 210) York urges Bolingbroke,—

And another, bearing the name of York, in 2 Henry VI. (act. iii. sc. 1, l. 343, vol. v. p. 162), declares to the nobles,—

Also Hermia, Midsummer Night’s Dream (act. ii. sc. 2, l. 145, vol. ii. p. 225), when awakened from her trance-like sleep, calls on her beloved,—

Whitney combines Freitag’s and Reusner’s Emblems under one motto (p. 189), In sinu alere serpentem,—“To nourish a serpent in the bosom,”—but applies them to the siege of Antwerp in 1585 in a way which Schiller’s famous history fully confirms:^[112]—“The government of the citizens was shared among too many hands, and too strongly influenced by a disorderly populace to allow any one to consider with calmness, to decide with judgment, or to execute with firmness.”

The typical Sinon is here introduced by Whitney,—

In fact, Sinon seems to have been the accepted representative of treachery in every form; for when Camillus, at the siege of Faleria, rewarded the Schoolmaster as he deserved for attempting to give up his scholars into captivity, the occurence is thus described in the Choice of Emblemes, p. 113,—

Shakespeare is even more frequent in his allusions to this same Sinon. The Rape of Lucrece, published in 1594, speaks of him as “the perjured Sinon,” “the false Sinon,” “the subtle Sinon,” and avers (vol. ix. p. 537, l. 1513),—

Also in 3 Henry VI. (act. iii. sc. 2, l. 188, vol. v. p. 285), and in Titus Andronicus (act. v. sc. 3, l. 85, vol. vi. p. 527), we read,—

and,—

But in Cymbeline (act. iii. sc. 4, l. 57, vol. ix. p. 226), Æneas is joined in almost the same condemnation with Sinon. Pisano expostulates with Imogen,—

Doubtless it will be said that such allusions to the characters in classical history are the common property of the whole modern race of literary men, and that to make them implies no actual copying by later writers of those who preceded them in point of time; still in the examples just given there are such coincidences of expression, not merely of idea, as justify the opinion that Shakespeare both availed himself of the usual sources of information, and had read and taken into his mind the very colour of thought which Whitney had lately spread over the same subject.

The great Roman names, Curtius, Cocles, Manlius and Fabius gave Whitney the opportunity for saying (p. 109),—

And these few lines, in fact, are a summary of the plot and chief incidents of Shakespeare’s play of Coriolanus, so that it is far from being unlikely that they may have been the germ, the very seed-bed of that vigorous offset of his genius. Almost the exact blame which Whitney imputes is also attributed to Coriolanus by his mother Volumnia (act. v. sc. 3, l. 101, vol. vi. p. 407), who charges him with,—

And when wife and mother have conquered his strong hatred against his native land (act. v. sc. 3, l. 206, vol. vi. p. 411), Coriolanus observes to them,—

The subject of Alciat’s 119th Emblem, edition 1581, p. 430, is the Death of Brutus, with the motto,—

Fortuna virtutem superans,—

“Fortune overcoming valour.”

Alicat, 1581.

Cæsareo poſtquàm ſuperatus milite, vidit

Ciuili vndantem ſanguine Pharſaliam;

Jam iam ſtricturus moribunda in pectora ferrum,

Audaci hos Brutus protulit ore ſonos:

Infelix virtus; & ſolis prouida verbis,

Fortunam in rebus cur ſequeris dominam?

On the ideas here suggested Whitney enlarges, p. 70, and writes,—

So, in the Julius Cæsar (act. v. sc. 5, l. 25, vol. vii. p. 413), the battle of Philippi being irretrievably lost to the party of the Republic, and Marcus Cato slain, Brutus, meditating self-destruction, desires aid from one of his friends that he may accomplish his purpose,—

The alarum continues,—the friends of Brutus again remonstrate, and Clitus urges him to escape (l. 30),—

Once more is the alarum raised,—“Fly, fly, fly.” “Hence, I will follow thee,” is the hero’s answer; but when friends are gone, he turns to one of his few attendants, and entreats (l. 44),—

In the presence of the conquerors Strato then declares,—

And we must mark how finely the dramatist represents the victors at Philippi testifying to the virtues of their foe (l. 68),—

The mode of the catastrophe differs slightly in the two writers; and undoubtedly, in this as in most other instances, there is a very wide difference between the life and spiritedness of the dramatist, and the comparative lameness of the Emblem writers,—the former instinct with the fire of genius, the latter seldom rising above an earth-bound mediocrity; yet the references or allusions by the later poet to the earlier can scarcely be questioned; they are too decided to be the results of pure accident.

In one instance Whitney (p. 110, l. 32) hits off the characteristics of Brutus and Cassius in a single line,—

It is remarkable how Shakespeare amplifies these two epithets, “pale and wan” into a full description of the personal manner and appearance of Cassius. Cæsar and his train have re-entered upon the scene, and (act. i. sc. 2, l. 192, vol. vii. p. 329) the dictator haughtily and satirically gives order,—

“Pale and wan,”—two most fruitful words, certainly, to bring forth so graphic a description of men that are “very dangerous.”

Of names historic the Emblem writers give a great many examples, but only a few, within the prescribed boundaries of our subject, that are at the same time historic and Shakespearean.

Vel post mortem formidolosi,—“Even after death to be dreaded,”—is the sentiment with which Alciatus (Emblem 170), and Whitney after him (p. 194), associate the noisy drum and the shrill-sounding horn; and thus the Emblem-classic illustrates his device,—

Literally rendered the Latin elegiacs declare,—

These curious ideas Whitney adopts, and most lovingly enlarges,—

The cry^[114] “A Talbot! a Talbot!” is represented by Shakespeare as sufficient in itself to make the French soldiers flee and leave their clothes behind; 1 Henry VI. (act ii. sc. 1, l. 78, vol. v. p. 29),—

And in the same play (act ii. sc. 3, l. 11, vol. v. p. 32), when the Countess of Auvergne is visited by the dreaded Englishman, the announcement is made,—

Whitney, 1586.

Five or six instances may be found in which Shakespeare introduces the word “lottery;” and, historically, the word is deserving of notice,—for it was in his boyhood that the first public lottery was set on foot in England; and judging from the nature of the prizes, he appears to have made allusion to them. There were 40,000 chances,—according to Bohn’s Standard Library Cyclopædia, vol. iii. p. 279,—sold at ten shillings each: “The prizes consisted of articles of plate, and the profit was employed for the repair of certain harbours.” The drawing took place at the west door of St. Paul’s Cathedral; it began “23rd January, 1569, and continued incessantly drawing, day and night, till the 6th of May following.”^[115] How such an event should find its record in a Book of Emblems may at first be accounted strange; but in addition to her other mottoes, Queen Elizabeth had, on this occasion of the lottery, chosen a special motto, which Whitney (p. 61) attaches to the device,—

which, after six stanzas, he closes with the lines,—

Lines from Ovid, 2 Trist., are in the margin,—

Silence, also, was represented by the image of the goddess Ageniora. In an Emblem-book by Peter Costalius, Pegma, edition Lyons, 1555, p. 109, he refers to her example, and concludes his stanza with the words, Si sapis à nostra disce tacere dea,—“If thou art wise, learn from our goddess to be silent.”

That Casket Scene in the Merchant of Venice (act i. sc. 2, l. 24),—from which we have already made long extracts,—contains a reference to lotteries quite in character with the prizes, “articles of plate and rich jewelry.” Portia is deeming it hard, that according to her father’s will, she “may neither choose whom she would, nor refuse whom she disliked.” “Is it not hard, Nerissa, that I cannot choose one, nor refuse none?”

“Ner. Your father was ever virtuous; and holy men, at their death, have good inspirations: therefore, the lottery, that he hath devised in these three chests of gold, silver, and lead,—whereof who chooses his meaning chooses you—will, no doubt, never be chosen by any rightly, but one who shall rightly love.”

The Prince of Morocco (act ii. sc. 1, l. 11) affirms to Portia,—

and Portia answers,—

The prevalence of lotteries, too, seems to be intimated by the Clown in All’s Well that Ends Well (act i. sc. 3, l. 73, vol. iii. p. 123), when he repeats the song,—

and the Countess reproving him says,—

“What, one good in ten? you corrupt the song, sirrah.

Clo. One good woman in ten, madam; which is a purifying o’ the song: would God would serve the world so all the year! we’d find no fault with the tithe-woman, if I were the parson: one in ten, quoth a’! an’ we might have a good woman born but one every blazing star, or at an earthquake, ’twould mend the lottery well: a man may draw his heart out, ere a’ pluck one.”

Shakespeare’s words will receive a not inapt illustration from the sermon of a contemporary prelate, Dr. Chatterton, Bishop of Chester from 1579 to 1595, and to whom Whitney dedicated the Emblem on p. 120, Vigilantia et custodia,—“Watchfulness and guardianship.”^[118] He was preaching a wedding sermon in Cambridge, and Ormerod, i. p. 146, quoting King’s Vale Royal, tells us,—

“He used this merry comparison. The choice of a wife is full of hazard, not unlike to a man groping for one fish in a barrel full of serpents: if he escape harm of the snakes, and light on the fish, he may be thought fortunate; yet let him not boast, for perhaps it may be but an eel.”

That “good woman” “to mend the lottery well,” that “one fish in a barrel full of serpents,” came, however, to the chance of one of Cæsar’s friends. Even when Antony (Antony and Cleopatra, act ii. sc. 2, l. 245, vol. ix. p. 40) was under the witchery of the “rare Egyptian queen,” that “did make defect, perfection,” the dramatist says,—

The Emblems applicable to Shakespeare’s historical characters are only a few among the numbers that occur in the Emblem writers, as Alciat, Cousteau, Giovio, Symeoni, &c.: but our choice is limited, and there would be no pertinency in selecting devices to which in the dramas of our author there are no corresponding expressions of thought, though there may be parallelisms of subject.

Alciat’s Arms (Giovio, ed. 1562).

KNOTTED together as are Emblems and the very language of Heraldry, we must expect to find Emblem writers devoting some at least of their inventions to heraldic purposes. This has been done to a very considerable extent by the Italians, especially by Paolo Giovio, Domenichi, Ruscelli, and Symeoni; but in several other authors also there occur heraldic devices among their more general emblems. These are not full coats of arms and the complete emblazonnes of “the gentleman’s science,” but rather cognizances, or badges, by which persons and families of note may be distinguished. In this respect Shakespeare entirely agrees with the Emblem writers; neither he nor they give us the quarterings complete, but they single out for honourable mention some prominent mark or sign.

I attempt not to arrange the subject according to the Rules of the Art, but to exhibit instances in which Shakespeare and the Emblematists agree, of Poetic Heraldry, the Heraldry of Reward for Heroic Achievements, and the Heraldry of Imaginative Devices.

Of Poetic Heraldry the chief type is that bird of renown, which was a favourite with Shakespeare, and from which he has been named by general consent, “the Swan of Avon.” A white swan upon a shield occurs both in Alciat and in Whitney, and is expressly named Insignia Poetarum,—“The poets’ ensigns.”

The swan, in fact, was sacred to Apollo and the Muses; and hence was supposed to be musical. Æschylus, in his Agamemnon, makes Cassandra speak of the fable, when the Chorus bewail her sad destiny (vv. 1322, 3),—

i.e.,—“Yet once again I wish for her to speak forth prophecy or lamentation, even my own,”—and Clytæmnēstra mentions the singing of the swan at the point of death (vv. 1444–7),—

Which is to this effect: that when she has sung the last mortal lamentation, according to the custom of the swan, she lies down as a lover, and offers to me the solace of the bed of my joy.

Horapollo, ed. 1551.

This notion of the singing of the swan is to be traced even to the hieroglyphics of Egypt. In answer to the question, “Πῶς γέροντα μουσικόν·”—how to represent “an old man musical?”—Horapollo, edition Paris, 1551, p. 136, replies,—

“Ιἐροντα μουσικὸν βουλόμενοι σημῇναι, κύκνον ζωγραφοῦσιν. οὑ~τος γαρ ἡδύτατον μέλος ᾅδει γηράσκων.”

i.e.—“Wishing to signify an old man musical, they paint a swan; for this bird sings its sweetest melody when growing old.” Virgil frequently speaks of swans, both as melodious and as shrill voiced. Thus in the Æneid, vii. 700–3; xi. 457,—

i.e.—“When they return from feeding, and through their long necks give forth melodious measures; the river resounds and the Asian marsh from far.”

i.e.—“Or on the fish-abounding river Po the hoarse swans give forth a sound through the murmuring pools.”

Horace, Carm. iv. 2. 25, names Pindar Dircæum cycnum,—“the Dircæan swan;” and Carm. ii. 20. 10, likens himself to an album alitem,—“a white-winged creature;” which a few lines further on he terms a canorus ales,—“a melodious bird,”—and speaks of his apotheosis to immortal fame.^[120]

Anacreon is called by Antipater of Sidon, Anthol. Græc. Carm. 76, κύκνος Τηϊος,—“the Teïan swan.”

Poets, too, after death, were fancifully supposed to assume the form of swans. It was believed also that swans foresaw their own death, and previously sang their own elegy. Thus in Ovid, Metam. xiv. 430,—