with the four pursuivants of Heralds'
College, from which the Scutorium was originally an offshoot.
He takes an innocent delight in displaying his treasures and
admitting you to the stores of his unique information; and I am sure
would welcome more visitors.

Students of Constitutional History will remember that strange custom,
half Roman, half Medieval, in accordance with which a baron or
knight, on creation or accession to his title and dignities,
deposited in the king's keeping a waxen effigy, or mask, of himself
together with a copy of his coat of arms. And it has been argued--
plausibly enough when we consider the ancestral masks of the old
Roman families, the respect paid to them by the household, and the
important part they played on festival days, at funerals, &c.--that
this offering was a formal recognition of the _patria potestas_ of
the monarch as father of his people. Few are aware, however, that
the custom has never been discontinued, and that the cupboards of
Westminster contain a waxen memorial of almost every man whom the
king has delighted to honour, from the Conquest down to the very
latest knight gazetted. The labour of modelling and painting these
effigies was discontinued as long ago as 1586; and the masks are no
longer likenesses, but oval plates of copper, each bearing its name
on a label. Mr. Robertson informed me that Charles I. made a brief
attempt to revive the old practice. All the Stuarts, indeed, set
store on the Scutorium and its functions; and I read in an historical
pamphlet, by Mr. J. Saxby Hine, the late curator, that large
apartments were allocated to the office in Inigo Jones's first
designs for Whitehall. But its rosy prospects faded with the
accession of William of Orange. Two years later the custody of the
shields (from which it obtained its name) was relegated to the
Heralds' College; and the Scutorium has now to be content with the
care of its masks and the performance of some not unimportant duties
presently to be recounted.

A reference from the Heralds' College sent me in quest of Mr.
Melville Robertson. But even in Dean's Yard I found it no easy
matter to run him to earth. The policeman (as I have said) could
give me no help. At length, well within the fourth doorway on the
east side, a