Note 17 — PASSING OF ROMANESQUE

How hardly this popular misconception of “Gothic” died away amongst us, is curiously exemplified in a statement which appeared in the once widely-read New Monthly Magazine (Colburn), 1841, edited by Theodore Hook and then by Thomas Hood. We read here, “The Heralds’ College knocked up a shield containing the armorial bearings of both the families.... The College tacked the tail of the sea woman to the head of a griffin—as everything ugly and unnatural is valued in Heraldry and Gothic architecture. This incongruous monster told well.”