University of Virginia Library

6. CHAPTER VI.

— Southey.

The name of Leonard must now be dropped as we proceed.
Some of the South American tribes, among whom
the Jesuits labored 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-Grace'd. “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 honorable 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 passed; 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 anything but
the Doctor again, — till I am registered at my burial by the
same name as at my christening.”