the name of the plain red flag, is clearly and straightly golden-flame simply. The adjective golden arises equally clearly from the golden red of the vermeil colour of the flame itself; the expression "the red gold" is a common old English one, and the Laureate's "browbound with burning gold" will not soon leave the language. The explanation of golden in oriflamme from the gilding of the pole of the flag is an utterly inadmissible one. There is one other possible explanation, however. The flag of Ali, as above shown (fig. 1), has what M. de Beaumont, in his fascinating "Origine du Blazon," calls golden "flames" on the red ground, and he also says that the French flag (fig. 7) exhibits similar "flames." But the first seem to me to be tongues, and the second flowers (the fleur-de-lis ?), which would account for the names oriflour, oireflor, just mentioned. In any case this will not apply to the self-coloured oriflamme flag, which all ought to be agreed was the original one.

This being so, we have to explain the flame part of the word, which has been handily done by saying that the banner was cut at the end into flame-shaped strips. But this will not quite answer, either. The flame notion must have come from its flirting about in the wind like flames or tongues of fire. The Scandinavian word flag itself, to flutter in the wind, contains the same idea, and, in the sense of a standard or ensign, answers the same purpose in English as flamme does in oriflamme. The Latin flamma, too, must have been flagma, from the Latin base flag, to burn, to blaze, blare, flare (all most likely cognate); which particular flag we still have in "flagrant " and "conflagration." And thus too the famous fiery or flaming sword of the gate of Eden is not directly connected with fire and flame, but only metaphorically so, by the turning and wheeling of the blade, as the late François Lenormant showed.

But then it may be said: If golden-flame be the name and the signification of oriflamme, how about your sacrificial-blood idea? The answer is easy, though it cannot be given in a sentence. In the first place, the golden-red, the orange-red, the "reddening," the vermeil, colour, is especially applicable to newly-shed arterial blood. In the Chanson de Roland (11th century) the knights make their swords vermeil with the warm blood of their enemies. In Jean Bodel's Chanson des Saxons (12th century) a beauty's perfumed mouth is more vermeil than blood is. A 12th-century Life of Thomas à Becket calls the martyr's blood vermeil, and the same poem calls the deep flush of anger vermeil. In the 13th-century Lai de l'Ombre the vermeil, that is the blood, rushes to the face, while the tears rise from the heart to the eyes. In classical Latin, rubor (redness) was especially

the blush, that is the blood-flush, of the face or body; and thence it came to mean bashfulness, shame, and even dishonour. Vermeil seems to have been originally that red dye which is given by the cochineal worm (ver). The notes to the "Debate between the Heralds of France and England" show that, the kermes dye being superseded, the red coats of our officers were dyed in modern times with cochineal, while the soldiers' coats were dyed with lac.

The statues of the great god Saturn, who inherited from a greater, Kronos, the right to human sacrifices, are represented by Tertullian in his discourse on Mantles (cap. 4) as draped in red: "Galatici ruboris superjectio Saturnam commendat." The sacerdotal vestments still worn on a martyr's feast have a similar sanguinary origin.

Then again, I have gone very far back indeed for the sacrificialblood idea, and if we go back equally far for the flame conception, we shall find that the Scandinavian Lödur, the god of red fire, gave red blood and vital heat; which points, in fact, to blood and vital heat being one and the same, as they actually are in Chinese and Japanese cosmo-philosophy, where the element fire answers to the bodily organ Heart, the colour Red, the planet Mars, and the good quality of Ceremoniousness or Ritualism; the last of which is strange enough, in view of what we shall presently see as to Rubric. The Japanese consider-they go so fast that we ought perhaps now to say they considered-blood and fire to be the same thing; as they practically were in the French poetical imagery of the later Middle Ages, which has just been quoted. In Baron's old "Art Heraldique," the colour gules is compared both to the flames of fire and the mixed humour of the blood. It is also, he says, the symbol of the day of judgment; and he goes on pleasantly to liken it to the wrath of God, which will then plunge the wicked in eternal flames.

Among the Arabs, and all over Asia, the manes, tails, and bellies of war-chargers were in very ancient times dyed with henna to represent blood. The warrior even dipped his sword-hand in the dye in order to look more terrible. It is said that when the Chinese brigand chief Fants'ung was ravaging the north-west provinces, about the thirtieth year of our era, he and his army dyed their eyebrows blood-colour to inspire a greater fright. It was war-paint, in factthe very grimmest of war-paint-and is to be seen on the horses in the coloured miniatures of ancient Persian manuscripts. The custom survives to this day in the East, without its meaning; Sir H. Layard describing the big white asses of Baghdad, whose tails and ears are dyed bright red with henna, while their bodies are splotched all over

with the same colour, like a heraldic talbot; and Miss Gordon Cumming, in her pleasant and valuable volumes on the Himalayas, says that at Lord Mayo's Durbar at Umballa, in March 1869, some of the horses of the sixteen rajahs there present were parcel-dyed in pink, and others russet with henna.

I think that in this supreme sacrifical archaic origin for the colour of the war-standard, the war horse, and warlike equipment, we may safely discern the possible and closely probable origin of a red-coated soldiery. Not alone so it also easily-and perhaps previouslygives us the origin of the imperial and royal colours of red (which thus became the livery of a royal army) and of purple, which, as everyone knows, came, because of its high status, to apply not only to the imperial colour but—just like the words gold and jewel—to any object of exceeding preciousness.

What we now call the purple colour would have been that of the blood-stained banner as it dried; for the purpureus of the Latin poets embraced red, reddish, blackish, and brown, as well as violet and purple. The name of the stone or marble, porphyry, which has an identical Greek origin with the word purple, gives us a permanent, independent, and trustworthy record of at least one of its earliest shades of colour and meaning. The Greek etymology given by Professor Skeat-porphuro (oppupw) to grow dark-exactly suits the present theory of a darkening blood-stain, and seems to jump some way with the roujoiant, reddening, which we have had above.

There seem to have been some thirteen tints of the Roman purple dye. The amethyst violet purple was much prized, and seems to have descended to the Roman prelates; but the colour of newlyshed blood was thrice as dear, and is said to have been got by a double-dyeing with two different shells, the murex and the purpura, in the factories of Tyre and Laconia. That was the purple that Milton, following Lucian's "Dea Syria," viii., meant in "Paradise Lost" (i. 450) when he wrote:

Smooth Adonis from his native rock
Ran purple to the sea, supposed with blood
Of Thammuz yearly wounded.

That was the purple that Virgil called the red of Tyre, rubor Tyrii, and it was the (ruber) colour of the ink with which the titles of the imperial Roman laws were written; and thence were those titles called rubrics, from which sense that last word has descended to its existing ecclesiastical meaning, giving us our red-letter days on the way. Of course it will not be forgotten that the Roman Emperor was also high priest, pontifex maximus, as

well as chief sacrificer. It is an interesting confirmation of the world-wideness of these ideas to find that in Japan in former times (as Mr. Masujima shows in the Transactions of the Asiatic Society there, xvii., 106) the red colour was reserved for the stamping of imperial documents; and that the custom originated in the blood stamps of more ancient times still, when the tip of the finger was pricked in order to put an inviolable blood-mark to an oath of fealty or a treaty of peace. The red impression of the whole palm of the Mikado Goshirakawa, 7c0 years ago, is still extant, and may be viewed by the curious in the Transactions just quoted.

That blood-red purple it is that doubtless has come down to our days in cardinal's red; in the red robes and gowns of peers and judges and dons; and in all other red robes and royal liveries, including the "pink" of the hunting field-for royal the chase once was—and even the mantle of a provincial town councillor, upon whose humdrum shoulders it has fallen all the way from Great Cæsar's, dead and turned to clay; for he indeed was the first Roman of them all that wore a toga all of purple. Previously the white toga prætexta of cavaliers, senators, magistrates, and children born free-born in the purple- had been only bordered with it. Augustus, a little later, granted the privilege of the self-coloured toga to senators who had been officers of State; but no sumptuary law was powerful enough to put down the general fashion, which then began to rage, of wearing robes wholly of purple; a mania which was not confined to the Roman male sex, and which still breaks out from time to time even in our own streets in an epidemic of flaring red cloaks and petticoats, which represent one phase of that multiform disease known to the irreverent as well as to the faculty as the "scarlet fever."

And so it is, as it seems to me, that the eye of imagination may track "the thin red line," which has so well lit up the foreground of many a battlefield, as it winds away, far away, through the middle distance of history, right up into the uttermost background of prehistoric tradition and myth.

JOHN O'NEILL.

"I

НА! НА! НА!

AM neither of a melancholy nor a cynical disposition," writes Lord Chesterfield in one of those eminently complacent and secular "Letters to his Son," "and as apt to be pleased as anybody; but I am sure that, since I have had the full use of my reason, nobody has ever heard me laugh." The loss to those who affected his lordship's company was perhaps, after all, not intolerable; for, in spite of his disclaimer, we cannot think of him as one whose risibility would have been likely to vent itself in a specially genial or hearty fashion. At best he would have simpered gracefully, always careful as he was, like Aristotle's Gentleman and many another Pharisee, to show himself, outwardly at least, superior to the weaknesses of common men. But the sentence quoted above may well serve as the text of some few further sentences on the subject of that almost universal, and wholly mysterious, expression of feeling which we are accustomed to designate as laughter. If, as the poet insists, "the proper study of mankind is Man," we are bound to consider him in all his aspects, some of them, it is true, being sufficiently humiliating. And of his minor peculiarities none are more curious than his method of indicating mirth. In former days, when Oxford logic was synonymous with "Aldrich," he was distinguished as bipes implumis, and, if a more minute specification became necessary, he was held to be classified beyond all possibility of confusion when duly labelled "animal risibile."

Albeit, and naturally enough, its moral and social anatomy must command more readily the interest of the lay mind, the physiologist's view of laughter, as dealing with the efficient cause of the thing, should certainly be stated at the outset. According to him, then, it "consists essentially in an inspiration succeeded, not by one, but by a whole series, often long continued, of short spasmodic expirations, the glottis being freely open during the whole time, and the vocal chords being thrown into characteristic vibrations" (Prof. M. Foster's "Physiology," p. 310). To laugh till we cry is to some of us a not unknown experience. The phenomenon becomes somewhat less