FRANCES HOWARD. THOMAS OVERBURIE.
Car finds a Whore. O! O! base Murther."
This sort of wit is not falser at least than the criticism which infers that D'Ewes' "judgment and taste were as contemptible as can well be;" for he might have admired these anagrams, which, however, are not of the nicest construction, and yet not have been so destitute of those qualities of which he is so authoritatively divested.
Camden has a chapter in his "Remains" on ANAGRAMS, which he defines to be a dissolution of a (person's) name into its letters, as its elements; and a new connexion into words is formed by their transposition, if possible, without addition, subtraction, or change of the letters: and the words must make a sentence applicable to the person named. The Anagram is complimentary or satirical; it may contain some allusion to an event, or describe some personal characteristic.[[113]]
Such difficult trifles it may be convenient at all times to discard; but, if ingenious minds can convert an ANAGRAM into a means of exercising their ingenuity, the things themselves will necessarily become ingenious. No ingenuity can make an ACROSTIC ingenious; for this is nothing but a mechanical arrangement of the letters of a name, and yet this literary folly long prevailed in Europe.
As for ANAGRAMS, if antiquity can consecrate some follies, they are of very ancient date. They were classed, among the Hebrews, among the cabalistic sciences; they pretended to discover occult qualities in proper names; it was an oriental practice; and was caught by the Greeks. Plato had strange notions of the influence of Anagrams when drawn out of persons' names; and the later Platonists are full of the mysteries of the anagrammatic virtues of names. The chimerical associations of the character and qualities of a man with his name anagrammatised may often have instigated to the choice of a vocation, or otherwise affected his imagination.
Lycophron has left some on record,—two on Ptolemæus Philadelphus, King of Egypt, and his Queen Arsinöe. The king's name was thus anagrammatised:—
ΠΤΟΛΕΜΑΙΟΣ,
Ἁπὁ μελιτος, MADE OF HONEY:
and the queen's,