Henry Beckles Willson

**Henry Beckles Wilson**

#### English original

There must be many thousands of grown-up readers of this magazine who can still recall the surprise and chagrin they felt on discovering that not one solitary specimen of so popular, so imperial, an animal as the Unicorn was on exhibition at the Zoo. In later times they would probably be obliged to confess that beyond the fact that the Unicorn is a fabulous monster, nothing whatever was known by them of his character and antecedents.

What British statesman or poet apostrophises the Unicorn?— he is not even to be found in the pages of *Punch* or of *Whitaker*. Yet the mere circumstance of his being a romantic myth, a picturesque legend, ought, one would think, to stimulate rather than diminish our interest and enthusiasm.

Of the lion, his bulky and ferocious companion on the Royal arms, there is nothing new to be said. He has become woefully commonplace; he is marched into every metaphor; he is caged in every draughtsman's studio. We are all of us, rhetorically speaking, habitual lion-tamers; but where is the orator so fearless or the cartoonist so original as to compare, for grace, freedom, and agility, the British Empire to the British Unicorn? Perhaps we have not yet reached the Unicorn stage of development; but is it not marvellous that with the rise and influence of the Scotch in the national councils there have been no attempts to claim greater prestige for an emblem which originated locally and was long exclusively borne north of the Tweed?

The Unicorn was probably carried as a crest in Germany and Flanders before it appeared in Scotland; but there is nothing to show that the Scotch copied it from thence.

The real genesis of the Unicorn was probably this: at a time when armorial bearings were becoming an indispensable part of a noble's equipment, the attention of those knights who were fighting under the banner of the Cross was attracted to the wild antelopes of Syria and Palestine. These animals are armed with long, straight, spiral horns set close together, so that at a side view they appeared to be but a single horn. To confirm this, there are some old illuminations and drawings extant which endow the early Unicorn with many of the attributes of the deer and goat kind. The sort of horn supposed to be carried by these Eastern antelopes had long been a curiosity and was occasionally brought back as a trophy by travellers from the remote parts of the earth. There is a fine one to be seen to-day at the abbey of St. Denis, and others in various collections in Europe. We now know these so-called unicorn's horns, usually carved, to belong to that marine monster, the narwhal, or sea-unicorn. But the fable of a breed of horned horses is at least as old as Pliny, and centuries later the Crusaders, or the monkish artists who accompanied them, attempted to delineate the marvel. From their first rude sketches other artists copied; and so each presentment was passed along until at length the present form of the Unicorn was attained. There was a time—not so long ago—when the existence of the Unicorn was as implicitly believed in as the camel or any other animal not seen in these latitudes; and the translators of the Bible set their seal upon the legend by translating the Hebrew word *reem* (which probably meant a rhinoceros) as "unicorn." Thus the worthy Thomas Fuller came to consider the existence of the Unicorn clearly proved by the mention of it in Scripture! Describing the horn of the animal, he writes, "Some are plain, as that of St. Mark's, in Venice; others wreathed about it, which probably is the effect of age, those wreaths being but the wrinkles of most vivacious unicorns. The same may be said of the colour: white when newly taken from the head; yellow, like that lately in the Tower, of some hundred years seniority; but whether or no it will soon turn black, as that of Plinie's description, let others decide."

All the books on natural history so late as the seventeenth century describe at length the Unicorn; several of them carefully depict him as though the artist had drawn straight from the life.

If Art had stopped here the wonder of the Unicorn would have remained but a paltry thing, after all. His finer qualities would have been unrecorded, and all his virtues hidden. But, happily, instead of this, about the animal first conceived in the brain of a Greek (as Pegasus also was), the embodied through the fertile fancy of the Crusader, the monks and heraldists of the Middle Ages devised a host of spiritual legends. They told of his pride, his purity, his endurance, his matchless spirit.

"The greatnesse of his mynde is such that he chooseth rather to dye than be taken alive." Indeed, he was only conquerable by a beautiful maiden. One fifteenth century writer gives a recipe for catching a Unicorn. "A maid is set where he hunteth; and she openeth her lap, to whom the Unicorn, as seeking rescue from the force of the hunter, yieldeth his head and leaveth all his fierceness, and resteth himself under her protection, sleepeth until he is taken and slain." But although many were reported to be thus enticed to their destruction, only their horns, strange to say, ever reached Europe. There is one in King Edward's collection at Buckingham Palace.

Naturally, the horn of such an animal was held a sovereign specific against poison, and "ground Unicorn's horn" often figures in mediæval books of medicine.

There was in Shakespeare's time at Windsor Castle the "horn of a Unicorn of above eight spans and a half in length, valued at above 10,000*l*." This may have been the one now at Buckingham Palace. One writer, describing it, says:

"I doe also know that horn the King of England possesseth to be wreathed in spired, even as that is accounted in the Church of St. Dennis, than which they suppose none greater in the world, and I never saw anything in any creature more worthy praise than this horne. It is of soe great a length that the tallest man can scarcely touch the top thereof, for it doth fully equal seven great feet. It weigheth thirteen pounds, with their assize, being only weighed by the gesse of the hands it seemeth much heavier."

Spenser in the "Faerie Queene" thus describes a contest between the Unicorn and the lion:—

Like as the lyon, whose imperial powre

A proud rebellious unicorn defyes

T'avoide the rash assault and wrathfull stowre

Of his fiers foe, him to a tree applies

And when him running in full course he spyes

He slips aside; the whiles that furious beast

His precious horne, sought of his enimyes,

Strikes in the stroke, ne thence can be released,

But to the victor yields a bounteous feast.

"It hath," remarked Guillim, in 1600, "been much questioned among naturalists which it is that is properly called the unicorn; and some have made doubt whether there be such a beast or no. But the great esteem of his horn in many places to be seen may take away that needless scruple."

Another old writer, Topsell, says:—

"These beasts are very swift, and their legs have not articles. They keep for the most part in the deserts, and live solitary in the tops of the mountaines. There was nothing more horrible than the voice or braying of it, for the voice is strained above measure. It fighteth both with the mouth and with the heeles, with the mouth biting like a lyon, and with the heeles kicking like a horse."

Naturally, also, upon the introduction of "supporters" to coats-of-arms in the fifteenth century, the claims of the Unicorn could hardly be successfully resisted. Scotland stole a march on other kingdoms and seized upon him with avidity. In the old book of Sir David Lindsay of the Mount, it displayed the escutcheon or shield of Scotland, with red lion on a gold ground, rampant, supported by two Unicorns, silver, and these were used by Mary Queen of Scots and by James VI, before his accession to the throne of England. Upon that event one of the supporting Unicorns had to give way to the golden English lion, but the other replaced the red dragon of Cadwalladar which the Welsh Tudors had associated with the lion to flank the national emblem.

A study of some of the Unicorns on the royal seals of the Jacobean period impels the belief that he was then a more frisky and conceited animal than he is in our times. Some of his attitudes are almost amusing.

A soberer time was in store for the Unicorn; for, as will be seen from the accompanying contemporary print, Oliver Cromwell, regarding him as the particular appendage of the Stuarts, dismissed him from the national coat-of-arms, and he remained for some years in disgrace. At a later day at the Revolution, he was again deposed and gave rise to the old doggerel verse about

"The Lion and the Unicorn

A-fighting for the Crown,

The Lion beat the Unicorn

And threw his Master down."

There is also a medal extant showing the lion of Nassau tearing to pieces the Unicorn of the Stuarts. With the Union in the reign of Queen Anne, however, the Unicorn reappeared, and he has never since left the Royal arms. Nor is belief in the Unicorn confined to Europe. By Chinese writers it is characterised as a "spiritual beast." The existence of the Unicorn is firmly credited by the most intelligent natives and by not a few Europeans. A very trustworthy observer, the Abbé Huc, speaks very positively on the subject: "The Unicorn really exists in Tibet. .... We had for a long time a small Mongol treatise on Natural History, for the use of children, in which a Unicorn formed one of the pictorial illustrations."

Next to the lion, he is perhaps the most frequently sculptured, engraved, and painted animal in the kingdom. It would be impossible to catalogue all the modern variations of the Unicorn. A black Unicorn is something of a novelty, but such appears on a familiar signboard in the vicinity of Charing Cross-the work, I believe, of Mr. William Strang. He is to be seen guarding and lending his regal presence to the portals of thousands of Royal warrant-holders; he is at the top of every official proclamation, and no Act of Parliament is complete without him. There used to be a tradition that at the College of Arms a special heraldic genius was engaged exclusively to limn the national Unicorn—by no means an easy animal to draw quickly and perfectly. If this belief be founded on fact and on actuality, this Unicorn artist-extraordinary to the Earl Marshal has a busy time before him in view of the countless emblazonments connected with the Coronation of his Gracious Majesty King Edward VII.