So much for people who are badly named.  Now for people who are too well named, who go top-heavy from the font, who are baptized into a false position, and find themselves beginning life eclipsed under the fame of some of the great ones of the past.  A man, for instance, called William Shakespeare could never dare to write plays.  He is thrown into too humbling an apposition with the author of Hamlet.  Its own name coming after is such an anti-climax.  ‘The plays of William Shakespeare’? says the reader—­’O no!  The plays of William Shakespeare Cockerill,’ and he throws the book aside.  In wise pursuance of such views, Mr. John Milton Hengler, who not long since delighted us in this favoured town, has never attempted to write an epic, but has chosen a new path, and has excelled upon the tight-rope.  A marked example of triumph over this is the case of Mr. Dante Gabriel Rossetti.  On the face of the matter, I should have advised him to imitate the pleasing modesty of the last-named gentleman, and confine his ambition to the sawdust.  But Mr. Rossetti has triumphed.  He has even dared to translate from his mighty name-father; and the voice of fame supports him in his boldness.

Dear readers, one might write a year upon this matter.  A lifetime of comparison and research could scarce suffice for its elucidation.  So here, if it please you, we shall let it rest.  Slight as these notes have been, I would that the great founder of the system had been alive to see them.  How he had warmed and brightened, how his persuasive eloquence would have fallen on the ears of Toby; and what a letter of praise and sympathy would not the editor have received before the month was out!  Alas, the thing was not to be.  Walter Shandy died and was duly buried, while yet his theory lay forgotten and neglected by his fellow-countrymen.  But, reader, the day will come, I hope, when a paternal government will stamp out, as seeds of national weakness, all depressing patronymics, and when godfathers and godmothers will soberly and earnestly debate the interest of the nameless one, and not rush blindfold to the christening.  In these days there shall be written a ‘Godfather’s Assistant,’ in shape of a dictionary of names, with their concomitant virtues and vices; and this book shall be scattered broadcast through the land, and shall be on the table of every one eligible for godfathership, until such a thing as a vicious or untoward appellation shall have ceased from off the face of the earth.

CRITICISMS

CHAPTER I—­LORD LYTTON’S ‘FABLES IN SONG’