But from all this it will be seen that a much better fight was made in behalf of the old nick forms than of the diminutives. By a timely rally, Tom, Jack, Dick, and Harry were carried, against all hindrances, into the Restoration period, and from that time they were safe. Wat, Phip, Hodge, Bat or Bate, and Cole lost their position, but so had the fuller Philip, Roger, Bartholomew, and Nicholas, But the opponents of Puritanism carried the war into the enemy’s camp in revenge for this, and Priscilla, Deborah, Jeremiah, and Nathaniel, although they were rather of the Reformation than Puritanic introductions, were turned by the time of Charles I. into the familiar nick forms of Pris, Deb, Jerry, and Nat. The licentious Richard Brome, in “The New Academy,” even attempts a curtailment of Nehemiah:
“Lady Nestlecock. Negh, Negh!
Nehemiah. Hark! my mother comes.
Lady N. Where are you, childe? Negh!
Nehemiah. I hear her neighing after me.”
Act iv. sc. 1. (1658).
It was never tried out of doors, however, and the experiment was not repeated. Brome was still more scant in reverence to Damaris. In “Covent Garden Weeded” Madge begins “the dismal story:”
“This gentlewoman whose name is Damaris——
Nich. Damyris, stay: her nickname then is Dammy: so we may call her when we grow familiar; and to begin that familiarity—Dammy, here’s to you. (Drinks.)”
After this she is Dammy in the mouth of Nicholas throughout the play. This, too, was a failure. Indeed, it demonstrates a remarkable reverence for their Bible on the part of the English race, that every attempt to turn one of its names into a nick form (saving in some three or four instances) has ignominiously failed. We mean, of course, since the Reformation.
The Restoration was a great restoration of nick forms. Such names as had survived were again for a while in full favour, and the reader has only to turn to the often coarse ballads and songs contained in such collections as Tom d’Urfey’s “Pills to Purge Melancholy” to see how Nan, Sis, Sib, Kate, and Doll had been brought back to popular favour. It was but a spurt, however, in the main. As the lascivious reaction from the Puritanic strait-lacedness in some degree spent itself, so did the newly restored fashion, and when the eighteenth century brought in a fresh innovation, viz. the classic forms, such as Beatrix, Maria, Lætitia, Carolina, Louisa, Amelia, Georgina, Dorothea, Prudentia, Honora—an innovation that for forty years ran like an epidemic through every class of society, and was sarcastically alluded to by Goldsmith in Miss Carolina Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs, and the sisters Olivia and Sophia—the old nick forms once more bade adieu to English society, and now enjoy but a partial favour. But Bill, Tom, Dick, and Harry still hold on like grim death. Long may they continue to do so!
(c.) The Decay of Saint and Festival Names.
There were some serious losses in hagiology. Names that had figured in the calendar for centuries fared badly; Simon, Peter, Nicholas, Bartholomew, Philip, and Matthew, from being first favourites, lapsed into comparative oblivion. Some virgins and martyrs of extra-Biblical repute, like Agnes, Ursula, Catharine, Cecilia, or Blaze, crept into the registers of Charles’s reign, but they had then become but shadows of their former selves.
‘Sis’ is often found in D’Urfey’s ballads, but it only proves the songs themselves were old ones, or at any rate the choruses, for Cecilia was practically obsolete: