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pearl; Susanna a lily; Esther a star; Drusilla
is dewy eyes; Dousabel is douce et belle;
Leonard is a lion's heart; Lancelot a little lance;
Bernard is a bear's heart; Richard a rich heart;
Everard a boar's heart; Lambert a lamb's
heart; Godhart a good heart; Manhard, or
Harman, a man's heart; and Gerard is all heart.
William is Gild-helme, gilt helmet; and Walter
is a woodman; Winfred and Winoufreda win
peace; Wilfred willed peace; Sigismond is the
mouth of victory; and Raymond is rein mund,
pure mouth; Matilda is a maiden champion;
Hugh is joy or gladness; Humphreyof old,
Humfrid, or Homefredis home peace; Henry
is have wealth; Godfrey, or Geoffrey, is good
peace; Alfred, all peace; Frederic, rich in peace;
Francis is free; and Lanfranc, free of the land.
Stephen is a crown; Charles was once Gar-edel,
all noble; Leopold is keeper of peace or love,
from leof, now changed to love, and hold, to
keep; Christopher Columbus is the Christ-
bearer Dove. All the Beaus are beautiful, as
Beauchamp, Beauchief, Beaulieu, in some
instances changed to Bewdley and Bewley. But
"Nabuchodonosor" is the most marvellously
treated. According to Southey, "he was
exposed when an infant under a tree; a she-goat
gave him suck, and an owl hooted at noonday
from the boughs above; this unusual noise
attracted the notice of a leper who was passing
by: he turned aside to the tree, saw the child,
and preserved him, and in memory of these
circumstances named him Nabuchodonosor;
Nabug signifying in Chaldee an owl, codo a she-
goat, and nosor a leper." The Capuchin monks
were a certain body of Franciscans, who wore
a peculiar hood or capuchon; the Carmelites
were instituted at Mount Carmel; the
Cistercians were the monks of Citeaux; and the
Lollards are doubtful, being derived either from
lollen, to chant, from lolium, tares among the
wheat, and from a possible but problematical
Loller, assumed to be a now forgotten but then
influential founder or member of the sect. It is
very common to make a man's name into a
significant emblem, and Loller may have been as
real a person as Luther, Calvin, Brown, or
Irving, as Burke, Macadam, Joseph Manton,
Volta, or Galvani.

But the oddest things of all are to be found in
the dictionaries. Why they are all kept there
no one knows; but what man in his senses
would use such words as zythepsary for a brew-
house, and zumologist for a brewer; would talk
of a stormy day as procellous and himself as
madefied; of his long-legged son as increasing
in procerity but sadly marcid, of having met
with much procacity from such a one; of a bore
as a macrologist; of an aged horse as macro-
biolic; of important business as moliminous, and
his daughter's necklace as moniliform; of some
one's talk as meracious, and lament his last
night's nimiety of wine at that dapatical feast,
whence he was taken by ereption? Open the
dictionary at any page, and you will come on a
whole host of these words; simple Greek and
Latin with sometimes an Anglicised termination,
and sometimes not, as the introducer and user
thought fit. Now, these few specimens are apt
illustrations of the truths that to add to a
language is not always to enrich it, that
simplicity and strength are generally identical, that
diversity of terms is not subtilty of expression,
and that to be able to call the same thing by
two names is only a cumbersome addition and
no real enhancement to literature. But it is an
advantage to have distinct terms for the finest
shades of thought and feeling; and the famous
Greek aorists which puzzle every schoolboy,
and the famous Greek particles which drive
schoolmen to despair, and the German philosophical
abstractions drawn up from the very
depths of thought, making such infinite play for
the casuist, and the grand German compounds
which chisel out a whole figure by a single
stroke, are all true enrichments; while Johnson's
heavy Latinisms are ponderous, not strong,
being of that diseased growth which weakens
life while it increases bulk. The terser and
more concrete a language the better; the fewer
the words in which one's meaning may be
expressed the more forcible the style. Horne
Tooke calls the interjection "the brutish
inarticulate interjection, which has nothing to do
with speech, and is only the miserable refuge of
the speechless;" and so with all other wrappings
and artifices by which a small thought is made
to appear of size and weight, and the same image
is multiplied by simply being held in various
lights. People talk of being weakened and
debilitated, of bleaching white, of a bellicose
warrior, of being struck dumb and mute with
ire and rage; but they do not remember,
perhaps they do not always know, that they are
but doubling their words, and using two
languages instead of one. As a rule, the more
Saxon we use and the less Latin, the more
forcible, certainly the more simple and manly,
our style; above all things, it is well to avoid
double epithets which, analysed, mean the
same thing, and so only crowd the page without
enriching the thought or lightening up the
meaning. One word is better than two words
in all cases; and a Latin leash which shall bind
together two or three or four Saxon particles is
to be taken in preference to leaving those
particles for the reader to break his shins over as
he wanders down the page, stumbling over the
disjointed native boulders.

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