so famous. The entire question is tangled and difficult to unravel; but the more serious authorities appear to agree that the sacred banner of Jeanne d'Arc, which she said she cherished as being worth forty times her sword, which she held aloft at Rheims when Charles VII. came there to be crowned, was the first white flag ever seen in the French armies; and it, let it be remembered, was an essentially religious emblem,-it was the banner of the Virgin Mary, of her colour, and bearing her image: it was not a royal symbol; there was no white in the king's banner until the cross crept into it about the middle of the fifteenth century. It would appear, moreover, that at first the cross was carried in the centre of the blue, and that its arms did not stretch to the edges-just as the cross of Switzerland is blazoned now. It was probably only by degrees that the four arms extended, and that the "bannière de France" became a straight white cross between four blue corners, with gold fleurs-de-lys upon each square of blue. At last, when Francis I. was king, a pure white flag was occasionally employed as the special royal sign; but it is not till we get to Henri Quatre that the blue really disappears, and that the drapeau blanc becomes the flag of the Maison de France. It came in with the first Bourbon; it has always been the Bourbon mark; but it is a very modern emblem, for it only saw the light towards the end of the sixteenth century.

The theory of the gradual conversion of the blue flag into a white one is defended, with many proofs and many arguments, by M. Sepet, himself an ardent Legitimist, who evidently would do the best to serve his cause; yet even he cannot carry the origin of the Bourbon flag more than three hundred years back. It is true that, as has just been said,

Francis I. sometimes used a cornette blanche;" but white did not. become the accepted royal hue till Henri Quatre made it so. His flag was white-his scarf was white, his plume was white, his livery was white-white was the colour of the Royalists against the League.. Under Louis XIII, the use of white grew on. The " rose de ruban blanc"-what we now call the white cockade-began to be worn on the hats of soldiers. The cravates of the flags were white. And yet, with all this, the old blue of France did not disappear. The drapeau blanc was military and royal, but not national; and the squadrons of the fleet preserved as their distinguishing emblems three ensigns which indicated the three successive transformations of the colours-blue, blue and white, and white. And - which is a far stronger proof-the white flag was rigorously reserved for war-ships. All merchant-vessels carried, according to the wording of the ordinance of Louis XIV., "the old flag of the French nation, which is, a white cross on a blue standard"-that is to say, the flag which intervened between the blue banner of St Louis and the white one of Henri Quatre.

The white flag, thus established, lasted for two centuries. For just. two hundred years, from 1589, it was the royal standard. On the 13th of July 1789 appeared the first symptom of the rival which was to take its place, and to make the flag of France more glorious still. On that day, at the Hotel de Ville of Paris, the National Guard was. constituted, and a cockade of red and blue (the colours of the capital and of the livery of its échevins) was assigned to it as a special badge. The next day the Bastille was taken. On the 17th the king came up from Versailles, went to

the Hotel de Ville, received the new cockade from the Mayor of Paris, and put it in his hat. Then Lafayette proposed to add the white, "in order to nationalise the ancient colour of France;" and so the tricolour was created by the adjunction of the royal white to the local red and blue of Paris. It may be worth observing that several kings of France had used red, white, and blue for the liveries of their servants; and the later Bourbons, including both Louis XVIII. and Charles X., employed those colours regularly for that purpose. But the tricoloured cockade in no way sprang from that accidental mixture. It was, as we have just shown, an amalgamation of the colours of rebellious Paris and of the beaten king.

The flag, however, did not at first follow the cockade; each of the sixty sections of the Garde Nationale of Paris had its own ensign: some had a red flag, some had white, some had blue, and some had various mixtures of red, white, and blue, with crosses, fleurs-de-lys, and caps of liberty. But, though there were hesitations about the flag, there were none whatever with reference to the new cockade; it spread rapidly through France, and became the special mark of the Revolution, in contradistinction to the white cockade which the "aristocrats " still wore. The white flag held on for some months in spite of this. At the fête of the federation in the Champ de Mars on 14th July 1790, nearly all the flags were white. It was not till the 22d of October of that year that the new colours were transplanted from the cockade to the flag of France by a vote of the Constituante. after a violent discussion which lasted for three days. But this first flag was red, white, and blue; it was not till 15th February 1794 that the Convention made the final

change, and instituted the present tricolour, blue, white, and red, the flag of the Consulate and the Empire-the first absolutely national emblem which France had ever possessed.

From all this it results that the white flag is essentially the Bourbon mark. Every Bourbon king in France has borne it as a royal, personal, and military standard; but it has never been employed as a national symbol in the secondary though important sense of citizen or mercantile usage. For that purpose, as we saw just now, blue with a white cross was, before the Revolution, the only legal ensign. Furthermore, at that time, each province and each seaport flew its own special colours; so that, really, the white flag was at no time the universal banner of the French nation. It is easy enough to understand that, individually, as a Bourbon prince, the Comte de Chambord should regard the drapeau blanc as an attribute of his royalty, and should refuse to separate himself from it; but if, in addition to its employment as his personal standard, he decides (as he seems to do, though he has not spoken clearly on the subject) to impose this one flag on France to the exclusion of all others, then, manifestly, he puts himself historically in the wrong. He is already as wrong as he can be in the political aspect of the question; but, leaving that consideration entirely aside, and limiting our view to this one point of the historically proved usages of the drapeau blanc, we are unable to conceive the grounds on which the Comte de Chambord can rest his apparent claim that, for the first time since the white ensign was invented, noother flag shall exist in France beside it. Here ends this agitated story for the moment; but before we travel on from France to other nations it will

be worth while to note that the drapeau rouge, to which the Communists of Europe have lately given a distinctive character, was not originally a revolutionary emblem. It was adopted by the Constituante simply as a signal of the proclamation of martial law; it was for this reason that Lafayette employed it for the first time in the Champ de Mars on 17th July 1791. Since then it has changed its meaning.

The stories of the colours of other countries are a good deal shorter and more simple than the tale of the flag of France; but still, almost every ensign has some sort of history. The flags of Belgium and of the new German Confederation sprang into existence all complete, and were at once officially adopted and set forth in 1831 and 1866, in the first Constitution of their respective countries. But these two cases are exceptions, so far, at least, as the more important nations are concerned; the other examples of direct creation of a standard which have been recently supplied by Mexico, by some of the American Republics, and by the Danubian Principalities, do not present general interest enough to be worth quoting here. The rule amongst European nations is, that flags have slowly grown, with more or less of change and hesitation, into their actual form. In our own case, for instance, the red banner with the golden leopards, and the white standard with the square red cross, which waved so long on all our battle-fields, gave way at last to the first Union Jack, comprising the crosses of St Andrew and St George. This symbol was constituted in 1606 by a proclamation of James I., and grew later on into its present shape by the addition of St Patrick's cross for Ireland. The Stars and Stripes, again, modern though they be, were not made all at once. "On the

1st of January 1776," as Mr Bancroft tells us in his history, "the tricoloured American banner, not yet spangled with stars, but showing thirteen stripes of alternate red and white in the field, and the united red and white crosses of St George and St Andrew on a blue ground in the corner, was unfurled" at Boston. It was not till eighteen months after this first attempt that the badge of England disappeared from the new ensign. On 14th June 1777 the crosses were struck out; on that day Congress "resolved that the flag of the thirteen United States should be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the Union be thirteen stars, white on a blue field, representing a new constellation." The heraldry was original, but the idea was excellent, and it has grown a good deal since by the addition of other stars to the "constellation." The history of the flag of Holland is somewhat more complicated. That flag was the first tricolour invented, and it has been pretended that its horizontal orange, white, and blue were suggested by Henry IV. of France, who, according to the legend, was requested by the Dutch to choose their colours for them when they became independent; but in Jonge's Note on the Nederlandsche Vlag it is proved by the evidence of the tapestries of Middleburg, which were executed in 1591, and depicted battles fought twenty years before, that this flag existed and was in use when the Béarnais was still almost a boy. It may be that the blue and white was copied from the French out of gratitude for the goodwill which Henry III. showed to the struggling United Provinces ; but Jonge denies even that, and will have it that the Nassau colours were not orange only, but orange, white, and blue: whence came, he says, the old cry of Holland, "Oranje

boven!" (orange above), as a reference to the position of the orange in the ensign. And yet this famous Nassau orange (the name of which came, after all, from a little principality in France) was replaced by red for some cause, and at some date unknown, before the end of the seventeenth century. Even William, when he came to England in 1688, wore above his own standard a pennant of red, white, and blue.

Here we may open a parenthesis, and draw attention to the fact that this first tricolour has been largely imitated. The Dutch pattern has been copied, in various colours, and with or without charges in the field, by France, Belgium, Italy, Mecklenburg, Roumania, Servia, and the German Confederation, and by Russia too, for its merchant-vessels; while, in the two Americas, it has been adopted by the majority of the Governments south of the United States. Of the four essential types into which navy ensigns may be divided-arms, crosses, stripes, and · tricolours-arms are blazoned by Prussia, Austria, Spain, Portugal, and Brazil; crosses are employed by Russia, England, Denmark, Sweden, Oldenburg, and Norway; stripes by a very few; while tricolours are now flown by no less than nineteen several states. And yet, with all this multiplicity of adoption, and with all their varied contrasts, the tricolours have never become grand flags to look at. That white standards should be dull was to have been expected, and the two of them which the Bourbons carried, in France and Naples, proved what a cheerless colour white is for a banner; but it might have been supposed that red, white, and blue, especially when imperially sprinkled with golden bees, and with the crown and eagle in the centre, would make a grand effect. And yet those Napo

leonic colours faded almost into dul- . ness beside the imperial and royal yellow flag of Austria, with its double-headed thrice-crowned sable eagle, charged with shields of arms and with the collar of the Golden Fleece, surrounded by its triangulated border of red, yellow, white, and black. And even this again turns pale when it is compared to the royal standard of the King of Prussia, which is by far the noblest flag that flies. Nothing that silk or bunting has ever shown, can approach the glory of the iron cross on the red-purple field, all covered with black eagles and golden crowns, illuminated by the white edges of the cross, and by the central white escutcheon. It really is superb; and such of us as saw it waving over the Prefecture at Versailles will well remember how the splendour of its aspect looked worthy of the grandeur of its career.

Most other flags are in the happy state of having no history that is worth telling; and even if they had, it would not be possible to narrate here the origin of each one of them, for there are so many that the mere enumeration would occupy several pages. The French 'Encyclopédie de la Marine' describes 237 of them as being in existence in 1787 in the maritime states of Europe; and though the composition of the list has radically changed since then, the total number in all the world is now vastly larger. Including all the various national and official sorts-royal standards, naval and military colours, and commercial, local, and special flags, but not comprising signals, or any private or unauthorised inventions - there exist at present more than 1100 different ensigns. This addition is, however, necessarily below the reality, for it cannot be supposed that a really complete catalogue exists anywhere; there must be many

it.

flags which remain unknown to the compilers, however careful they may be; and, furthermore, it does not contain any of the emblematic colours. The standard of the prophet (though it still exists), the corsair's hand and sabre on a red ground, the pirate's black, and even the yellow of quarantine, and the white of truce and peace, are all omitted from The increase which it shows during the present century has evidently been produced by the rapid multiplication of new nations in America and Asia. It is in no degree a consequence of any particular flag-inventing proclivity of our epoch; on the contrary, the tendency is manifestly towards diminution and unification of each nation's symbols. Local flags (that is, flags of provinces and towns) are falling out of fashion everywhere; and even the old distinction between the naval and commercial colours of each country is so rapidly disappearing, that at this moment more than two-thirds of the maritime states employ the same flag for both purposes. Some day, perhaps, the world will get on further still, and, imitating the excellent example which, in this one respect, France now offers us, will adopt, throughout the universe, one single ensign for all the needs of each separate state. In this way the complications of the subject would disappear, and it would cease to be impossible to distinguish without a guide - book between the various flags which fly.

After flags, the most striking symbols of a nation are those which we find on its shield of arms; and here, without going into heraldry, there is a fresh field of curious vanities to explore. The history of the double-headed eagle, for example, adds a wide page to the tale of pride; and though its earlier details are not quite distinct, we know

enough about it to be able to follow its main developments. Some people pretend that Constantine was the first to double the Roman bird, and that he did so because his empire had grown into two parts, while still forming one single body. Others argue that this theory is unfounded, because a two-skulled eagle was depicted on the Antonine column, which was put up a hundred years before Constantine was born. Others again assert that, at whatever date the change was made in the Western or Eastern Empire, the old Roman symbol did not definitely acquire a second head in Germany until Sigismund put it on in the fifteenth century. The single-headed bird seems to have been taken up by Charlemagne as his imperial emblem when he was crowned at Rome; but it made no appearance on the German flag until the time of Otho II., although it was reproduced meanwhile on the seals of the Palatines and Margraves, and finally on the coin. It was still in use in 1356, for the seal of the Golden Bull bears a onebeaked bird, though Louis of Bavaria had temporarily employed a double eagle in 1325. Wenceslos copied Louis in 1378, and put two heads upon his seal as "a sign of majesty," but it was not, as has just been said, till the time of Sigismund (who was elected emperor in 1410) that the double bird became the distinctive sign of the German Empire.

Russia also bears a double-headed eagle; it was first adopted by Ivan Wassiliwitch about the year 1500, on the occasion of his marriage with a niece of the last Emperor of Constantinople, in order to thereby demonstrate that he claimed to have become the representative of the extinct Greek emperors. The German and the Russian bird present certain differences of aspect: their