CHRISTIAN NAMES.
(Vol. vii., pp. 406. 488, 489.)
The opinion of your correspondents, that instances of persons having more than one Christian name before the last century are, at least, very rare, is borne out by the learned Camden, who, however, enables me to adduce two earlier instances of polyonomy than those cited by J. J. H.:
"Two Christian names," says he (Remaines concerning Britaine, p. 44.), "are rare in England, and I onely remember now his majesty, who was named Charles James, and the prince his sonne Henry Frederic; and among private men, Thomas Maria Wingfield, and Sir Thomas Posthumous Hobby."
The custom must have been still rare at the end of the eighteenth century, for, as we are informed by Moore in a note to his Fudge Family in Paris (Letter IV.):
"The late Lord C. (Castlereagh?) of Ireland had a curious theory about names; he held that every man with three names was a Jacobin. His instances in Ireland were numerous; Archibald Hamilton Rowan, Theobald Wolfe Tone, James Napper Tandy, John Philpot Curran, &c.: and in England he produced as examples, Charles James Fox, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, John Horne Tooke, Francis Burdett Jones," &c.
Perhaps the noble lord thought with Sterne in Tristram Shandy, though the nexus is not easy to discover, that "there is a strange kind of magic bias, which good or bad names irresistibly impose upon our character and conduct," or perhaps he had misread that controverted passage in Plautus (Aulular. Act II. Sc. 4.):
"Tun' trium literarum homo
Me vituperas? Fur."
The custom is now almost universal; and as, according to Camden (Remaines, &c., p. 96.),
"Shortly after the Conquest it seemed a disgrace for a gentleman to have but one single name, as the meaner sort and bastards had,"
so now, the tria nomina nobiliorum have become so common, as to render the epigram upon a certain M. L-P. Saint-Florentin, of almost universal applicability as a neat and befitting epitaph.
"On ne lui avait pas épargné," says the biographer of this gentleman (Biographie Universelle, tom. xxxix. p. 573.), "les épigrammes de son vivant; il en parut encore contre lui au moment de sa mort; en voici une:—
'Ci gît un petit homme à l'air assez commun,
Ayant porté trois noms, et n'en laissant aucun.'"
William Bates.
Birmingham.
Leopold William Finch, fifth son of Heneage, second Earl of Nottingham, born about the year 1662, and afterwards Warden of All Souls, is an earlier instance of an English person with two Christian names than your correspondent J. J. H. has noticed.
J. B.