CHAPTER LXXX.
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.”
