History of Christian names

by Charlotte M. Yonge

Of such as are with any illness docked:

Dish Alcibiades holds out a lure

Of sundry articles, all nicely cooked;

And Phocion Aristides Franklin Tibbs,

Sells ribbons, laces, caps, and slobbering-bibs.’

The Roman and Greek influence has been strong, producing Cato, Scipio, Leonidas, &c.; but the habit of calling negroes by such euphonious epithets has rather discouraged them among the other classes, and the romantic, perhaps, predominates with women, the Scriptural with men. The French origin of many in the Southern States, and the Dutch in New England, can sometimes be traced in names.

Section VII.—Germany.

What was said of Frankish applies equally to old High German, of which Frankish was a dialect, scarcely distinguishable with our scanty sources of information.

We have seen Frankish extinguished in Latin in the West; but in the East we find it developing and triumphing. The great central lands of Europe were held by the Franks and Suevi, with the half civilized Lombards to their south, and a long slip of Burgundians on the Rhine and the Alps, all speakers of the harsh High German, all Christians by the seventh century, but using the traditional nomenclature, often that of the Nibelungenlied. The Low Germans, speaking what is best represented by Anglo-Saxon literature, were in the northerly flats and marshes, and were still heathens when the Franks, under Charlemagne conquered them, and the Anglo-Saxon mission of Boniface began their conversion.

The coronation of Charles by the pope was intended to establish the headship of a confederacy of sovereigns, one of them to be the Kaisar, and that one to be appointed by the choice of the superior ones among the rest. This chieftainship remained at first with the Karlingen; but after they had become feeble it remained, during four reigns, with the house of Saxony, those princes who established the strange power of the empire over Italy, and held the papal elections in their hands. It was under them that Germany became a confederation, absolutely separate from her old companion France.