If it were necessary, we could easily show how the same thing has happened to the vocabularies of the two countries that has befallen the two nomenclatures. We smile when a Yankee says, “I guess,” “I calculate,” and “I reckon;” but when we read in the Epistle of St. Paul the sentence “I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us,” do we always reflect, as we might do, that our translators and revisers of 1611 were simply putting into the mouth of the apostle a phrase which was then colloquial English, but now survives, in all its familiarity, only in the United States, whither the Puritan Fathers had carried it? This comparison we might easily extend, but it is not our subject.
As for American baptismal nomenclature in general, it is all but entirely Biblical. The only book the refugee took with him was his English Bible. His piety was fed from its pages, his life was likened to its histories, his surroundings had the same cast of primeval simplicity; he discovered a resemblance between his own new life and that of the patriarchs, and it pleased him to stereotype the resemblance by the adoption of their names. From out that Book alone he named his offspring, and thus to this day,—such is the power of tradition,—“Brother Jonathan” and “Uncle Sam” are but representatives of a class of names which well-nigh engrosses every other. A single instance will suffice to show how this great mass of Biblical nomenclature arose. Charles Chauncy died in New England, 1671. He emigrated from Hertfordshire, where the family had been settled for centuries. His children were Isaac, Ichabod, Sarah, Barnabas, Elnathan, Nathaniel, and Israel. All these grew up and settled in New England.
It has been well said, that were it not for our English Bible the two languages of the United States and England would slowly but surely separate themselves into two distinct dialects, possibly tongues. Certainly it is to that book which Wycliffe,—whom we commemorated in 1877,—wrote into English, we owe the fact that in no respect is there a closer bond and deeper sympathy betwixt England and America than in that which concerns the nomenclature of the two countries. In what respect they differ I have shown. While we have dropped some names that marked eccentricity, and restored some of the older and more pagan cognomens from the oblivion that seemed so certainly to await them, they have clung tenaciously to that more quaint and large class of names of Scriptural origin, which their forefathers of Puritan stock bore with them across the ocean in days when America was as yet a portion of the British dominions.
May the twofold offspring of one stock hold fast still, as in days of yore, to that One Name in the Bible which is above every name! Then shall the two great branches of the Anglo-Norman race continue to multiply and be strong, and all the continents of the world shall be blessed through their means.
CHAPTER VII.
OFFICERSHIP.
I set out with the intention of writing six chapters on the “London Directory;” and, lo! I have reached the mystic seven. The worst of it is, that at the present rate of progress I shall have to transgress the editorial licence by at least four more before I can possibly bring my remarks to a close, consistent with the demands of my subject. Nevertheless, the Editor has only to say the word, and I will wipe,—not my tearful eye, but my goose quill, and bid my courteous reader adieu!
The other day I met a friend, and he greeted me with the remark, “Awfully dry.” Thinking he referred to the weather—it was the end of June—and feeling decidedly warm, I assented cordially, when I discovered that the statement was intended to be a less polite than concise criticism upon one or two of my later instalments to The Fireside, on the subject that heads these pages. My friend made several other remarks founded on the first, and went so far as to offer me some advice—a very dangerous thing, as everybody knows. It was to this effect: “Stick to your text.” What is my text? I asked, thinking to take him off his guard. “The London Directory,” he replied promptly.
Well, I must admit that in the last two papers I slightly wandered from my text. My excuse is this: baptismal names are in the London Directory as well as surnames; and the baptismal names of to-day are as different from the baptismal names of five hundred years ago as were the baptismal names of five hundred years ago from those in vogue five hundred years before that. This curious fact I wished to bring out and develop. At the same time I wanted to show that it was the English Bible that had caused the change. Whether I succeeded in so doing, I must leave to the reader to decide. At any rate, I can now turn, with such cheerfulness as my stern critic has left me, to the next class of English Surnames represented in the London Directory—that originated by Office, whether ecclesiastical or civil. I have got the Directory itself at my left elbow, not merely as a monitor to warn me, but also as a reference to support me. Looking to this mighty tome, then, for inspiration as well as illustration, I at once begin.
The Directory teems with relics of the feudal system. There is not a single office belonging to that formal and ceremonious age which is not commemorated within its pages. Whether it were service within the baronial hall or tenure without, all was held by a retinue who thought no office too mean or servile for acceptance. The feudatory, in fact, could seemingly do nothing; everything was done for him. He could eat and drink, ’tis true, and he did both to the great admiration of all beholders; but he had an officer to carve his meat for him; another to change his plate; a third to crack jokes for him, to aid his digestion; a fourth to extend a bowl to wash his fingers; a fifth to hand him a napkin to wipe them; a sixth to hold his wine-cup for him; and a seventh to taste each fresh dish set before him, so that in case poison had been put in the food, his taster might drop down dead instead of himself. Why the baron hadn’t an officer to wipe his nose for him, I can’t say; it has always been a mystery to me. One thing, however, is certain. As he sat and ate and drank, he had a little crowd of officers who thought it only too high a distinction to perform duties so menial, that a scullion in the present day, if asked to undertake some of them, would probably reply, “Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this thing?” At any rate, he would give you a month’s notice, to a certainty.
That all these officerships existed, the Directory still shows; for I have no hesitation in saying that the finest and most trustworthy records of the feudal age are to be found, not in the British Museum in Great Russell Street, nor the Bodleian Library at Oxford, but in that great red-backed tome which lies on the shelf in every London warehouse. Imagine our going to these dry and prosaic emporiums of merchandise for an account of a long past state of life, which, with all its barbarism, is well-nigh the most poetical era of English history. I mentioned seven officers who tended the baron at his meals. Taking the Directory, I find twelve Carvers, two Sewers, eleven Napiers and Nappers, six Ewers, one hundred and twenty-five Pages, not to mention our various “Cuppages” (i.e. Cup-page), Smallpages, and Littlepages, six “Says,” and twenty-four “Sayers.” ’Tis true there are no “Fools” in the Directory, though there may be plenty out of it; but once it was a very common name indeed, and denoted the officer, if I may use the term, whose duty it was to convulse the table with laughter by making the most ludicrous jokes he could invent, backing them up with all sorts of grimaces and contortions. He was a professed punster, too, and had free licence to make them at the expense even of his lord. Indeed, the fool could make a joke with impunity, which would have cost any other man his head. Of course he wore a fool’s-cap as the insignia of his office. The Napier, or Napper, set the napkins, once called “napes.” A curious and silly story has got abroad, that the Scotch Napiers got their surname from one Donald, whose prowess was so great in a certain battle, that the king said he had “na peer,” that is, no equal. His friends,—so the tale goes,—from henceforth styled him Donald Na-pier. The Scotch Napiers are, as Mr. Lower shows, of the house of Lennox, and owed their cognomen to the office I have described, held by their ancestors in the royal household. The Ewer carried the ewer of water in front of the Napier; and as they had no forks in those days, and used their left hand in a manner which would be now considered the reverse of polite, no wonder that between every course the napier and ewer would be busy indeed. Even the carver had no fork, and had to use his fingers very freely with the joints. In the “Boke of Kervynge,” an old manual of etiquette for young squires, there is a strict order to this effect:—“Sett never on fyshe, flesche, beest, nor fowle, more than two fyngers and a thumbe”! The young squire had early to learn this accomplishment; and therefore Chaucer, describing his Squire, made a point of saying in his favour,—