In after life, although we fail to trace its working, that name which careless godfathers lightly applied to your unconscious infancy will have been moulding your character, and influencing with irresistible power the whole course of your earthly fortunes.  But the last name, overlooked by Mr. Shandy, is no whit less important as a condition of success.  Family names, we must recollect, are but inherited nicknames; and if the sobriquet were applicable to the ancestor, it is most likely applicable to the descendant also.  You would not expect to find Mr. M’Phun acting as a mute, or Mr. M’Lumpha excelling as a professor of dancing.  Therefore, in what follows, we shall consider names, independent of whether they are first or last.  And to begin with, look what a pull Cromwell had over Pym—­the one name full of a resonant imperialism, the other, mean, pettifogging, and unheroic to a degree.  Who would expect eloquence from Pym—­who would read poems by Pym—­who would bow to the opinion of Pym?  He might have been a dentist, but he should never have aspired to be a statesman.  I can only wonder that he succeeded as he did.  Pym and Habakkuk stand first upon the roll of men who have triumphed, by sheer force of genius, over the most unfavourable appellations.  But even these have suffered; and, had they been more fitly named, the one might have been Lord Protector, and the other have shared the laurels with Isaiah.  In this matter we must not forget that all our great poets have borne great names.  Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Shelley—­what a constellation of lordly words!  Not a single common-place name among them—­not a Brown, not a Jones, not a Robinson; they are all names that one would stop and look at on a door-plate.  Now, imagine if Pepys had tried to clamber somehow into the enclosure of poetry, what a blot would that word have made upon the list!  The thing was impossible.  In the first place a certain natural consciousness that men would have held him down to the level of his name, would have prevented him from rising above the Pepsine standard, and so haply withheld him altogether from attempting verse.  Next, the booksellers would refuse to publish, and the world to read them, on the mere evidence of the fatal appellation.  And now, before I close this section, I must say one word as to PUNNABLE names, names that stand alone, that have a significance and life apart from him that bears them.  These are the bitterest of all.  One friend of mine goes bowed and humbled through life under the weight of this misfortune; for it is an awful thing when a man’s name is a joke, when he cannot be mentioned without exciting merriment, and when even the intimation of his death bids fair to carry laughter into many a home.