ARTICLE VII. — NAME-WORDS IN THE VERNACULAR.

I MEAN proper nouns; words which have designated specific persons, and have passed from that use into common speech. If we could think of speech as a separate entity from written language, and then personify the two, they would take the attitude of friendly belligerents; and speech would appear to be making reprisals upon her queenly sister for former donations. It is speech who gives names. And whenever society, law or letters require a label for a specific individual, she has to furnish it, and so begins by naming families Baker, Carpenter, Brewer, &c., or White, Brown, Black, &c., according to their occupation, or some striking peculiarity. "Some travelers tell us," says Thoreau, "that an Indian had no name at first, but earned it, and his name was his fame." This is doubtless always the beginning of the process in primitive name-giving. At first a name is an individual definition. In course of time, and with the prodigious increase of individuals to be named, this might well become an exhausting process; and speech might look about her for means of indemnifying herself. It is easy to do so by taking back some of these appellatives and making them do duty again in the vernacular; reducing them, that is, from their official dignity to the common rank and file. If, for example, Macadam contrives a fine road, she makes him contribute his name as well as his brains to the process. If the Earl of Orrery has a scientific toy dedicated to him by a star-gazing friend, she demands his name for the honor, and orrery" it must be. When such a monster as Burke furnishes murdered bodies for dissection, she brands it as the crime of "burking," and so insures to him the curse of a perpetual infamy.

If, to change the figure, we conceive of language under the similitude of a gallery of art, these name-words will be the portraits and statues in it. There is personality in them, like the life which beams from the portrait or is veiled in the statue. Here we shall find poets, admirals, inventors, gods and demigods enshrined together. Some of the portraits are of life-size,

as in "epicure; some are but miniatures, like " magpie," "tomtit," "petrel." There are statues of gods, like those figured in the words "jovial," "martial," "volcano," "easter;" demigods, as in "atlas," "titan," "herculean;" and saints, as in "valentine," "samphire," "tawdry;" while for statuettes we have such as "fairy," "vestal," "siren," "hobgoblin." It is the most extensive gallery known. It has been the work of old masters and young, and has been collecting for twenty centuries.

Let us examine its treasures. The first samples we should come to would be those in which the name is directly affixed to the object without change; as the Armstrong gun, Remington rifle, Minie ball, Argand burner, Drummond light, Mansard roof, Babbitt metal, Baldwin apple, Graham bread. Prominent natural objects are often so distinguished, as Hudson river, Bunker hill, Delaware bay-even to the stars, as Herschel and Leverrier. It is common to call a man's works by his name, whether hand work or head work. Thus, we do not read the plays of Shakspeare, the poems of Wordsworth, the essays of Carlyle we read Shakspeare, Wordsworth, Carlyle. We call a violin a genuine Amati. A painting is a Rubens, a Titian, a Turner, a Vandyke, a Murillo. The temperature is so many degrees Fahrenheit. A monstrous lie is a Munchausen. Such as these are in common use, and greatly enrich the defining power of the language. In many instances of this direct application, the thing which takes the name goes off with it, and leaves the man who furnished it forgotten. Joseph Ignace Guillotine has disappeared behind the terrible machine he introduced. The droll "silhouettes" in our magazines never remind us of the French minister of finance, whose dogged economy doomed his name to be affixed derisively to the cheapest of all portraits. We read of a "lazaretto" without thinking of Lazarus. "Music" does not recall the muses, nor does "museum," nor "mosaic." There are even traditions that the word "derrick" is all that now remains of one Theodorick, a hangman at Tyburn, who long since vanished from his ghastly stage.

Another class is made up of that immense number of names which have received a termination and now do duty as adjectives; Darwinian, Baconian, Machiavellian, Calvinistic, Coper

nican, Homeric, Mosaic, Pauline, Mohammedan, &c. Carlyle speaks of Brummellian politeness. James Russell Lowell says Wordsworthian, Lockist, Kantist, and even Popist. The only requisites for attaining to this much of fame are, first, to bring on some new thing in art, religion, philosophy, literature, or state; and secondly, to bear a name which will make a pronounceable adjective. We can call a stanza Spenserian, Tennysonian, Anacreontic; but euphony would go mad over such terminals as Moore-an, Keats-y, Southey-istic, Goethe-an, Longfellow-ine, Thackeray-ic; however worthy of the honor those eminent names might be. Some of these name-adjectives have become specifically appropriated to a particular fact, and have no other application; as Fabian policy, Torricellian vacuum, Elizabethan age, Cæsarian section, Fallopian tubes, Gordian knot, Justinian code, Napoleonic ideas. This is a common usage among professional men, and for the description of scientific facts. The same is true of the possessive; for example. Napier's logarithms, Archimedes' screw, Halley's comet, Glauber's salt, Bright's disease each of which contains a whole chapter of history in itself; to say nothing of such current phrases as Hobson's choice, Pandora's box, and such pet pseudonyms as Mother Carey's chickens.

The most interesting class of these personal words is that in which the name lies unsuspected until driven from its covert. It is easy to recognize Mesmer in "mesmerism," Galvani in "galvanism," Daguerre in the "daguerreotype." We can readily guess why those irreverent iron-smelters should call a mass of metal which will not yield to the hottest blast a "shadrach." King Mausolus affords us a convenient term for our most sumptuous tombs. The prince of Latin orators descends to us in the modern Italian "cicerone." We hear of Gerrymandering a district, Rareyfying a horse, Dunning a debtor, out-heroding Herod. Such words carry their origin in sight. But when we hear of a "maudlin" speech, we get at first no hint of Mary Magdalen. A "dunce" would never remind us of the Subtle Doctor Duns Scotus, nor a "pander" of the Trojan general Pandarus. A "pasquinade" tells us nothing about the mutilated statue of the gladiator dug up three hundred years ago in Rome, and the snappish cobbler Pasquino

who lived opposite. The downeast skipper who calls his craft a "morphodite" brig, has no thought of the mythological personage implied, nor has the good wife who "hermetically" seals her fruit-cans any notion of the arch-alchemist who gives his name, if no other aid, to the operation. It is curious how entirely hidden, buried, and forgotten in the commonest currency of speech are many of these personalities. We just fail of some expected pleasure and call it "tantalizing "—but who thinks of poor Tantalus? We rebuke our children for "hectoring" one another-but without a thought of the brave Trojan whose name we use. A "philippic" does not always re

mind us of Demosthenes' famous tirades. If the human list

falls short, mythology comes to the rescue. A shrewish woman we call a "Xanthippe;" and if she is worse than that, we invade the supernatural, and call her a "termagant," or an "ogress." We repent of our "sin;" but our Saxon fathers worshiped the goddess who furnished her name for so bad a use; nor do we bewilder our heads with the question how such a malversation of sense could have possibly come to pass.

It is not surprising that so much of Greek and Roman mythology-far more than of the Teutonic-has passed into our English vernacular. We not only speak a sister language, but are the heirs of their languages as well, which come to us freighted with their religious beliefs, their ideas of nature, their habits of thought. To the Latin especially our hospitable language has opened its doors wide, and has admitted such a throng of words that it is now more than half Latin itself. It would be strange if the current of Roman thought, which flowed. down through all the European provinces of the great empire, and in 1066 broke in a fresh deluge on the shores of Britain, should not have mingled itself freely with the tidal fluctuations of Saxon ideas. The conversion of Rome to Christianity did not eradicate from the minds of the people the notions which had grown up out of the popular mythology. Most of those ideas were essentially pagan. But the words which contained them held their ground in the language: and the ideas staid with them, but slightly modified to suit the new conditions. Thus it came about that a mass of Christianized heathenism was projected into the culture of every nation that was formed out

of the fragments of the disintegrating empire, and may be recognized in every language that is lineally descended from the Romance tongues of the Middle Ages. Milton in his Hymn on the Nativity finely describes the troops of gods and nymphs and genii exiled from their accustomed haunts by the birth of the wondrous Babe. But before they vanished they bequeathed to the world which they had adorned and deceived all that was immortal of their substance. Their temples became Christian churches. Their own names were often inspired with new meanings. Their very images sometimes held lights for the Christian service. All that was really true in these poetic conceptions of religion went cordially forward into the new realm of light which so suddenly and radiantly opened in the advent of Christ. And intermingled with the light of the later revelation are still discernible the colored rays of these earlier mythical thoughts of God, themselves oftentimes only the fragments of a still earlier primeval revelation which had drifted down over the shifting centuries.

To return to our own language, but few examples will be required to show how largely it has assimilated this mythological element. The gods of Olympus have presided over its growth, and still live in such common terms as "jovial,' "martial," "saturnine," "mercurial." The last named deity served the alchemists under the guise of quicksilver, and with his Greek name has furnished our theologues with their "hermeneutics." Bacchus does duty in our Christian civilization as a synonym for the pleasures of dissipation, just as much as he did among the people who personified the vice and then worshiped it; and has as large a following of "bacchanalians." The goddess who presided over harvests still names our "cereals." Another makes our maidens "vestals ;" and the "mosaic" pins they wear commemorate all the muses together. Hymen and Cupid are almost as familiar personages in our literature as the events they inspire. Vulcan is still at his forge in our "volcanoes," and we have so far undeified his godship as to set him to work "vulcanizing" rubber. We have been taught to sing "Great Pan is dead;" but he can be only constructively defunct, for an epiphany of him occurs in every "panic." Pallas is commemorated in "palladium." Even the two great systems