OBSERVATIONS WHICH SHEW THAT WHATEVER PRIDE MEN MAY TAKE IN THE
APPELLATIONS THEY ACQUIRE IN THEIR PROGRESS THROUGH THE WORLD, THEIR
DEAREST NAME DIES BEFORE THEM.
——Thus they who reach
Grey hairs, die piecemeal.
SOUTHEY.
The name of Leonard must now be dropt as we proceed. Some of the
South-American tribes, among whom the Jesuits laboured with such
exemplary zeal, and who take their personal appellations, (as most
names were originally derived,) from beasts, birds, plants and other
visible objects, abolish upon the death of every individual the name
by which he was called, and invent another for the thing from which it
was taken, so that their language, owing to this curiously
inconvenient custom, is in a state of continual change. An abolition
almost as complete with regard to the person had taken place in the
present instance. The name, Leonard, was consecrated to him by all his
dearest and fondest recollections. He had been known by it on his
mother's knees, and in the humble cottage of that aunt who had been to
him a second mother; and by the wife of his bosom, his first, last,
and only love. Margaret had never spoken to him, never thought of him,
by any other name. From the hour of her death no human voice ever
addressed him by it again. He never heard himself so called, except in
dreams. It existed only in the dead letter; he signed it mechanically
in the course of business, but it had ceased to be a living name.
Men willingly prefix a handle to their names, and tack on to them any
two or more honorary letters of the alphabet as a tail; they drop
their surnames for a dignity, and change them for an estate or a
title. They are pleased to be Doctor'd and Professor'd; to be
Captain'd, Major'd, Colonel'd, General'd, or Admiral'd;—to be Sir
John'd, my-Lorded, or your-Graced. “You and I,” says Cranmer in his
Answer to Gardiner's book upon Transubstantiation—“you and I were
delivered from our surnames when we were consecrated Bishops; sithence
which time we have so commonly been used of all men to be called
Bishops, you of Winchester, and I of Canterbury, that the most part of
the people know not that your name is Gardiner, and mine Cranmer. And
I pray God, that we being called to the name of Lords, have not
forgotten our own baser estates, that once we were simple squires!”
But the emotion with which the most successful suitor of Fortune hears
himself first addressed by a new and honourable title, conferred upon
him for his public deserts, touches his heart less, (if that heart be
sound at the core,) than when after long absence, some one who is
privileged so to use it, accosts him by his christian name,—that
household name which he has never heard but from his nearest
relations, and his old familiar friends. By this it is that we are
known to all around us in childhood; it is used only by our parents
and our nearest kin when that stage is past; and as they drop off, it
dies as to its oral uses with them.
It is because we are remembered more naturally in our family and
paternal circles by our baptismal than our hereditary names, and
remember ourselves more naturally by them, that the Roman Catholic,
renouncing, upon a principle of perverted piety, all natural ties when
he enters a convent and voluntarily dies to the world, assumes a new
one. This is one manifestation of that intense selfishness which the
law of monastic life inculcates, and affects to sanctify. Alas, there
need no motives of erroneous religion to wean us from the ties of
blood and of affection! They are weakened and dissolved by fatal
circumstances and the ways of the world, too frequently and too soon.
“Our men of rank,” said my friend one day when he was speaking upon
this subject, “are not the only persons who go by different
appellations in different parts of their lives. We all moult our names
in the natural course of life. I was Dan in my father's house, and
should still be so with my uncle William and Mr. Guy if they were
still living. Upon my removal to Doncaster my master and mistress
called me Daniel, and my acquaintance Dove. In Holland I was Mynheer
Duif. Now I am the Doctor, and not among my patients only; friends,
acquaintance and strangers address me by this appellation; even my
wife calls me by no other name; and I shall never be any thing but the
Doctor again,—till I am registered at my burial by the same names as
at my christening.”