CHAPTER VIII. THE ROAD OF HERALDS. DARK torrent, hemmed in on both sides by black and inaccessible rocks of granite, iron, and basalt, with a frowning tower above the opposite bank, seems to deny further passage; a few paces higher up there is a ford, however; and the road, winding at first through sycamores recalling Palestine, as it advances, leads us to cold sunless regions clad with broom, and to mounds only too familiar to many who journey through this forest of life. Again the same tall trees closing upon the road, we see at some distance before us, walking slowly as if taking the air, a lady clad in solemn black, preceded by the shield bearer of her family, bareheaded and holding his hat humbly in his hand. The road of heralds presents images of nobility, which have no particular charm for the stranger long since disabused. "Those who have never waded across the ford," says Antonio de Guevara, "will fear to enter the water even by day; but the man who had already crossed it, will pass it again courageously, even though it be in the night."* Having this experience, let us proceed and examine the further signals yielded by the great aggregate of the family, which are set up to guide those issuing on the roads of the world; for the house has not only by means of the living, direct and indirect instruction, supplied by its union and concord, its servants and guests, its influence on manners by discipline, by its very aspect, and by the recollections with which it was associated-it has also its positive history, its instruction by means of the dead; and that this presents another path which leads to the central point of the moral forest, I shall now endeavour to demonstrate. He who stops, obedient to the prophet, "on the roads, and inquires for the ancient paths, asking for the best to walk in them," will not be long without some guide professing skill, who points at genealogy, and the effects that are expected from circumstances of birth. All along the road he sees shields or titles graved upon the bark, or hanging from the boughs of trees; till through ruthless, vast, and gloomy woods he passes + Hier. vi. * L'Horloge des Princes, iii. 1340. * to some castle where owls are flitting round the evening tower ; and here he learns that nobility and ancestral titles are to be admired. The way is not imaginary; these forms and lessons are all found in life: but to begin in height, 66 as no delay of preface brooking through the zeal of right," think me not, reader, so unwary or accursed as to bring my feet again into the snare where once I have been caught ;" and invite you to join the promiscuous throng of old and modern Gentiles who magnify the greatness of this world, and extol its vain distinctions; for how many would have come safely to their country, if they had not been driven aside by a vast wave, not of the elements like that which smote Ulysses, but formed of the pride which swelled within their own foolish breasts? St. Antoninus once beheld a vision of angels seated on a poor man's roof. No herald can invent, or monarch grant, coat_arms meet to compete with the glory of that blazon. But though this path may seem devious, or at best uncertain, we find it presented to many as they issue into life, and accessible to all who cast a philosophic glance upon the ways and thoughts of men; and therefore we shall do well to follow it, occurring thus early in the natural order, that we may remark how even this road can lead us right, if we do but mark the signals which are placed along the way. That antiquity of race, not excluding even the principle of noble rank, should present some signals to guide men who follow it on the way to truth, cannot seem strange to those who observe that importance is ascribed to it in the sacred books of the Old Testament, and that it has been respected by the best men in all ages of the world. The law of primogeniture was divinely sanctioned ;† and no reproach is fixed upon the children of Berzellai, who, returning from the captivity, "sought the writing of their genealogy and found it not." The philosophers and poets of antiquity are all disposed to respect birth from a long line of virtuous ancestors. Epimenides even published a genealogy. Euripides is ridiculed by Aristophanes for his love of genealogical details. Plutarch believed nobility to be useful to the political state, and condemned the Sophists who pretended that noble birth was unproductive of noble actions. The Stoics, indeed, regarded low birth and poverty as things indifferent, neither good nor evil, as nothing should be called good of which an evil use can be made; but among things indifferent they distinguished things estimable, such as may be made to conduce to a life conformable to nature, and such they counted noble birth and riches. Sallust, in the beginning of the Jugurthine war, + Deut. xxi. + 1 Esdras ii. § Diogenes Laertius. * ix. 79. gives an instance to justify their opinion, for, saith he, "I have often heard Quintus Maximus and P. Scipio saying, that when they beheld the images of their ancestors, their minds used to be kindled vehemently to virtue, by having revived the memory of their actions." Virgil, too, assumes the utility of such birth, as in the lines "Sancta ad vos anima, atque istius inscia culpæ, Descendam, magnorum haud unquam indignus avorum.' "'* The tragedians all take the principle for granted, as when Megara exclaims, that they owe to their family glorious examples ὀφείλομεν γὰρ πολλὰ δώμασιν καλά. + They all believed, besides, in the force of blood, as expressed in the words of Menelaus to Telemachus αἵματος εἷς ἀγαθοῖο φίλον τέκος : + and in the frequent boast― τοῦ ἐγὼ γένος εὔχομαι εἶναι. The great Sophocles, too, furnishes an instance in the words which he ascribes to Teucer οὐκ ἄν ποτ', ἄνδρες, ἄνδρα θαυμάσαιμ' ἔτι, τοιαῦθ ̓ ἁμαρτάνουσιν ἐν λόγοις ἔπη. The gravest judges of the ancient world bowed in reverence to an ancient name. Marcus Æmilius Scaurus was acquitted, though guilty, propter vetustissimam nobilitatem, et recentem memoriam patris. This is, therefore, an ancient road of the old world, and perfectly familiar to him who is designated by our philosophy as the old man, whom it often confirms in his mental disorders, and leads to a bitter end. That we may not have to measure back the steps which we have trod, let us attend to the revolutions which have occurred in the whole region over which this road leads, and to the consequent alterations which it had to undergo before it was rendered passable by Christian feet. To conceive the extent of this vast change, let us imagine to ourselves the impressions which would have been caused in the minds of the first Christian nobles, if any one, citing Homer and the tragedians, had attempted to lead them back to the theory and practice of the ancient distinc * En. xii. 648. § xiv. 204. Hercul. Furens, 286. || Ajax, 1093. iv. 611. Val. Max. lib. viii. tions, which they had flung to the winds. Punicus Pudens, a Roman senator, Priscilla his wife, their son Pudens, and daughter-in-law Sabinella, with their children Timothy and Novatus, Pudentienne et Praxede-these formed the first family in which took place the transition from the high ideas on which the ancient patrician state reposed, to the sentiments of human fraternity which constituted Christian equality. It opened its senatorial mansion to those assemblies of the faithful, where the slave took his seat beside the great; and in that house the Christians of Rome had their first assembly, to receive communion from the hands of St. Peter.* What think ; you, reader, would have been thought in that house of noble birth, and the importance of ascribing superior greatness of mind to an exclusive class, formed of those who possessed riches and titles? The Appian way, as St. Jerome observes, bore witness to the change of manners and of mind, in regard to the pride of life, which the Christian religion had effected when St. Melanie and her daughters in the form of holy poverty passed along it, followed by opulent senators in splendid equipages. St. Melanie and her husband Pinier had lands in Italy and Sicily, in Spain and Great Britain, which they sold, and gave the price to the poor. In the whole empire no one had surpassed them in riches, excepting the emperor; and their palace in Rome was so magnificent that no Roman could have purchased it, if part of it had not been burned by the barbarians, when the whole was pillaged. Their charity was so universal, that they even supported hermits in many islands, besides building many monasteries and convents. St. Melanie, as Palladius attests, enfranchised 8,000 of her slaves. Clearly the old Gentile notions of human greatness and of noble birth must have undergone a vast alteration in the mind of St. Melanie, when, as St. Jerome says, she made use of the high nobility of her birth to despise more the world. We need not be invited to dwell on this consideration, of which the justice is at once obvious. Let us proceed to remark that the path of heralds, emanating so soon from the parental house, is nevertheless furnished with three signals to guide the wayfarer to the central point at which all human wishes meet -the first, historical, by proclaiming in a more sensible manner, arising from domestic associations, the truth of past events; the second, moral, displaying the vanity of nobility in the mere natural sense; and the third, religious, pointing to the Catholic faith as the means of exalting and rendering fruitful the principle itself. The force of family traditions, and the value of domestic * Gerbet, Esquisse de Rome Chrétienne, i. 185. history, where they really exist, cannot reasonably be disputed, which accounts for such grave men as Paul the Deacon relating their own genealogy, as does this historian, when treating de gestis Longobardorum ;* but unfortunately the number of houses which can truly feel and produce them is smaller than is often supposed; for, saving the respect due to many devoted compilers, we should not be at a loss in England to discover curious examples of what Valerius Maximus laments when writing de his qui per mendacium se in alienas familias inseruerunt. Formerly, indeed, even with royal permission, it was not deemed right to accept the name of any family which had male heirs without obtaining their consent; but confusion now is rather courted than eschewed. A name can be purchased and genealogies invented, as in pagan Rome, where, after the destruction of the ancient tables by the Gauls, those used were falsified to flatter certain families that wished to trace their descent high.§ If we had some races of great fame in history still among us, we might expect to learn much from them; but it will be much if we can now find their sepulchres. After citing a list of the knights of the order of the Band, Don Antonio de Guevara says, "Remark, seigneur count, how many ancient lineages are here enumerated, which are now not only finished, but forgotten. Where are the Albornozes and Tenorios; the Villages, Trillos, Quintanas, and Tiezmas; and, with these, the Cerveivelles, Bahomondes, Caronelles, Cisneros, Gaialbas, and Horozcos; from all which races sprang so many knights of great renown?" The names, indeed, of some existing families are Celtic, as Divonne. The patron saints of others who still give them baptismal names, are Saxon, as if denoting the race from which they spring; but learned authors affirm that our oldest nobility does not date before the tenth century, whatever genealogical chimeras may be produced. Of that house of Clermont, for example, which exercised sovereignty till the year 1340, when Ainard III. yielded his rights to the dauphin, nothing certain is known before the year 1040.** It was not even till the end of the reign of Philippe Auguste that families began to have fixed hereditary names, though surnames assumed by nobles from their fiefs began about the end of the second race of the French kings, about the year 987.†† It has been remarked by a late writer, that the ancient noble families of Europe are fast disappearing in Italy, Spain, Ger * Lib. iv. c. 39. § Life of Numa. + Lib. ix. De la Roque, 154. De la Roque de l'Orig. des Noms. L'Abbé Coyer, La Noblesse Commer. ** Hist. des Maisons des Comtes de Tonnerre et de Clermont, lxxv. ++ De la Roque, Traité de l'Origine des Noms, 51. |