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Updated: May 4, 2025


King René of Anjou, by special patent, authorized him to bear his name and arms, and made him a member of his family. The Duke of Burgundy, by a similar heraldic fiction, conferred upon him his name and armorial bearings. This will explain why Colleoni is often styled "di Andegavia e Borgogna." In the case of René, the honor was but a barren show.

There was a main gateway of lichen-studded stone, each side pillar surmounted by mouldering heraldic emblems, but besides this central carriage drive I observed several points where there were gaps in the hedge and paths leading through them. The house was invisible from the road, but the surroundings all spoke of gloom and decay.

The retablo of the high altar is almost more beautiful than wonderful, but the chief glory of the place is in the kneeling figures of the Great Captain and his wife, one on either side of the altar, and farther away the effigies of his famous companions-in-arms, and on the walls above their heraldic blazons and his.

Out of the huge hall, with its immense fireplace of delicately carved and inlaid grey and black stone, and its rows of family portraits, reaching from the wainscoting to the oaken ceiling, vaulted and ribbed like a ship's hull, opened the wide, flat-stepped staircase, the parapet surmounted at intervals by heraldic monsters, the wall covered with oak carvings of coats-of-arms, leafage, and little mythological scenes, painted a faded red and blue, and picked out with tarnished gold, which harmonised with the tarnished blue and gold of the stamped leather that reached to the oak cornice, again delicately tinted and gilded.

A sort of medieval twilight descends upon their latter years, and their souls receive the heraldic vision. They brood gloomily over the misdeeds of some long-dead ancestor, and their faces glow when they think of their crusading forefathers.

Out of the huge hall, with its immense fireplace of delicately carved and inlaid grey and black stone, and its rows of family portraits, reaching from the wainscoting to the oaken ceiling, vaulted and ribbed like a ship's hull, opened the wide, flat-stepped staircase, the parapet surmounted at intervals by heraldic monsters, the wall covered with oak carvings of coats-of-arms, leafage, and little mythological scenes, painted a faded red and blue, and picked out with tarnished gold, which harmonised with the tarnished blue and gold of the stamped leather that reached to the oak cornice, again delicately tinted and gilded.

There yet remain in the building a few tiles with heraldic emblems, some broken monuments, and some heaps of choice carvings, shattered as they fell, but afterwards collected and piled against the walls. The Duke of Beaufort, to whose estate it belongs, has done everything possible to arrest decay, and all is kept in perfect order.

This venerable heraldic document appears, if one may judge by the review in the Quarterly, to have been well-deserving of publication, owing to the extremely new and unexpected information which it contained upon Scottish archæology.

Now and then, as I watched, a knight fell, and a horse tore away riderless, his gold-'broidered trappings floating on the wind. When this happened, out of the illumined sea would writhe a glittering dragon, or scaly heraldic beast, to prance or fly along the horizon after the vanishing charger of the fallen knight.

On the pinnacle around the light delicately-wrought ironwork held great iron chandeliers, in which were placed pieces of rope steeped in resin; wicks which burned doggedly, and which no wind extinguished; and from top to bottom the tower was covered by a complication of sea-standards, banderoles, banners, flags, pennons, colours which rose from stage to stage, from story to story, a medley of all hues, all shapes, all heraldic devices, all signals, all confusion, up to the light chamber, making, in the storm, a gay riot of tatters about the blaze.

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