Wellbred, Downright, Fastidius Brisk, Volpone, Corbaccio, Sordido, and Fallace.  After the Restoration, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Massinger were, for a time, more popular than Shakespeare; so that the label-names seemed to have the sanction of the giants that were before the Flood.  Even when comedy began to deal with individuals rather than mere incarnations of a single “humour,” the practice of giving them obvious pseudonyms held its ground.  Probably it was reinforced by the analogous practice which obtained in journalism, in which real persons were constantly alluded to (and libelled) under fictitious designations, more or less transparent to the initiated.  Thus a label-name did not carry with it a sense of unreality, but rather, perhaps, a vague suggestion of covert reference to a real person.  I must not here attempt to trace the stages by which the fashion went out.  It could doubtless be shown that the process of change ran parallel to the shrinkage of the “apron” and the transformation of the platform-stage into the picture-stage.  That transformation was completed about the middle of the nineteenth century; and it was about that time that label-names made their latest appearances in works of any artistic pretension—­witness the Lady Gay Spanker of London Assurance, and the Captain Dudley (or “Deadly”) Smooth of Money.  Faint traces of the practice survive in T.W.  Robertson, as in his master, Thackeray.  But it was in his earliest play of any note that he called a journalist Stylus.  In his later comedies the names are admirably chosen:  they are characteristic without eccentricity or punning.  One feels that Eccles in Caste could not possibly have borne any other name.  How much less living would he be had he been called Mr. Soaker or Mr. Tosspot!

Characteristic without eccentricity—­that is what a name ought to be.  As the characteristic quality depends upon a hundred indefinable, subconscious associations, it is clearly impossible to suggest any principle of choice.  The only general rule that can be laid down is that the key of the nomenclature, so to speak, may rightly vary with the key of the play—­that farcical names are, within limits, admissible in farce, eccentric names in eccentric comedy, while soberly appropriate names are alone in place in serious plays.  Some dramatists are habitually happy in their nomenclature, others much less so.  Ibsen would often change a name three or four times in the course of writing a play, until at last he arrived at one which seemed absolutely to fit the character; but the appropriateness of his names is naturally lost upon foreign audiences.