according to his fancy on the panels. My family arms are the same,
which were borne by the Gibbons of Kent in an age, when the College
of Heralds religiously guarded the distinctions of blood and name: a
lion rampant gardant, between three schallop-shells argent, on a
field azure. I should not however have been tempted to blazon my
coat of arms, were it not connected with a whimsical anecdote. About
the reign of James the First, the three harmless schallop-shells
were changed by Edmund Gibbon esq. into three ogresses, or female
cannibals, with a design of stigmatizing three ladies, his
kinswomen, who had provoked him by an unjust law-suit. But this
singular mode of revenge, for which he obtained the sanction of Sir
William Seagar, king at arms, soon expired with its author; and, on
his own monument in the Temple church, the monsters vanish, and the
three schallop-shells resume their proper and hereditary place.

Our alliances by marriage it is not disgraceful to mention. The
chief honour of my ancestry is James Fiens, Baron Say and Scale, and
Lord High Treasurer of England, in the reign of Henry the Sixth;
from whom by the Phelips, the Whetnalls, and the Cromers, I am
lineally descended in the eleventh degree. His dismission and
imprisonment in the Tower were insufficient to appease the popular
clamour; and the Treasurer, with his son-in-law Cromer, was
beheaded(1450), after a mock trial by the Kentish insurgents. The
black list of his offences, as it is exhibited in Shakespeare,
displays the ignorance and envy of a plebeian tyrant. Besides the
vague reproaches of selling Maine and Normandy to the Dauphin, the
Treasurer is specially accused of luxury, for riding on a
foot-cloth; and of treason, for speaking French, the language of our
enemies: "Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the
realm," says Jack Cade to the unfortunate Lord, "in erecting a