The allusion to the star of Julius in connection with the lady's name
renders this device, in our opinion, rather neat and classical.

A still more startling sign of the times is exhibited by the
device-loving bishop. He relates that one Mattei, a man of noble
courage, when waiting with dissimulation and patience an opportunity
to murder a person by whom he had been insulted, applied to him
(Jovius) for an appropriate device; and the bishop, 'wishing to shew
that a noble mind has power to _digest_, with time, every grievous
injury,' designed an ostrich devouring a nail, with the motto,
_Spiritus durissima conquit_. Mattei wore the device, and ultimately
succeeded in assassinating his victim; and 'so much was this noble
revenge commended,' that the pope promoted the ruffian to be captain
of his guard--the family of the murdered man signing an agreement to
cancel all future quarrels.

Great care was requisite, when framing a device, lest any part of it
could be turned into ridicule by a witty or spiteful enemy. Charles
the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, bore a flint and steel, with the motto,
_Ante ferit quam flamma micet_ (As he strikes, the fire flashes); and
when defeated, and slain at the battle of Nancy, the day being cold,
with snow on the ground, his triumphant enemy, the Duke of Loreno,
said: 'This poor man, though he has great need to warm himself, has
not leisure to use his tinder-box.'

However puerile the 'art' may appear to us now, there can be little
doubt, that the construction of devices, as an incentive to the
acquisition of general knowledge, and as a kind of mental training,
was not altogether useless in its day, and formed a link, were it ever
so slender, in the development of the human mind. Estienne, a noted
French device-author, observes, that 'to express the conceptions of
our own mind in the most perfect device, there is nothing so proper,
so _gentile_, so powerful, or so witty, as the similitudes we discover
when walking in the spacious fields of Nature's wonderful secrets; for
the grace of a device, as well as the skill of him who makes it,
consists in discovering the correspondence of natural qualities and
artificial uses with our own thoughts and intentions.'

The old scholastic logic was freely employed in the arguments by which
the device-authors advanced their own opinions, or attacked those of
their contemporaries. Ammirato condemns the unphilosophical definition
of Jovius--that the emblem i