Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444, page 39 by Various Authors
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Household furniture, and implements of husbandry, were considered improper subjects for the emblem of a device; consequently, that of the Academia della Crusca was set down as decidedly vulgar, it being a sieve, with Il piu bel fior ne coglie (It collects the finest flour of it)--a play on the word crusca (bran), assumed as the title of the Academy, from its having been instituted for the express purpose of purifying (sifting) the Italian language.
Objects that were not recognisable unless painted in colours, were also inadmissible; thus the otherwise clever device of the Earl of Essex--a rough diamond, with the motto, Dum formas minuis (In fashioning, you diminish), came under the censure of the critics. In like manner, objects not easily distinguishable from others, were liable to the same condemnation. The celebrated device assumed by Mary Queen of Scots on the death of her first husband, Francis II., representing a liquorice-plant, with Dulce meum terra tegit (The earth covers my sweet), was pronounced faulty, because the liquorice-plant could not be readily distinguished from other shrubs, the roots of which wanted the property of sweetness so necessary to give point to the device. Unnatural or chimerical figures could not be admitted, excepting those to which tradition or classical authors had given fixed forms and attributes--as the mermaid, harpy, phoenix; consequently, a device representing a winged tortoise, the motto, Amor addidit (Love has added them), was improper. Qualities ascribed to animate or inanimate bodies by the ancients, were considered legitimate, though known by the moderns to be fictitious. Thus the dolphin, from the story of Arion, appears in devices as the friend of the distressed; the salamander, living in fire, typifies the strong passions, natural, yet destructive to their victim; the young stork, carrying the old one, illustrates filial piety; the crane, which, according to Pliny, holds a stone in its claw to avert sleep, is a fi