Nomen habes Coronati;
Te tormenta decet pati
Pro corona gloriae.
Elsewhere the same illustrious hymnologist plays in like manner on the name of St. Vincentius:
Qui vincentis habet nomen
Ex re probat dignum omen
Sui fore nominis;
Vincens terra, vincens mari
Quidquid potest irrogari
Poenae vel formidinis.
In the Bull for the canonization of Sta. Clara, the canonizing Pope does not disdain a similar play upon her name: Clara Claris praeclara meritis, magnae in caelo claritate gloriae, ac in terrâ miraculorum sublimium, clare claret. On these 'prophetic' names in the heathen world see Pott, Wurzel-Wörterbuch, vol. ii. part 2, p. 522.]
Irenaeus means in Greek 'the Peaceable'; and early Church writers love to remark how fitly the illustrious Bishop of Lyons bore this name, setting forward as he so earnestly did the peace of the Church, resolved as he was, so far as in him lay, to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. [Footnote: We cannot adduce St. Columba as another example in the same kind, seeing that this name was not his birthright, but one given to him by his scholars for the dove-like gentleness of his character. So indeed we are told; though it must be owned that some of the traits recorded of him in The Monks of the West are not columbine at all.] The Dominicans were well pleased when their name was resolved into 'Domini canes'—the Lord's watchdogs; who, as such, allowed no heresy to appear without at once giving the alarm, and seeking to chase it away. When Ben Jonson praises Shakespeare's 'well-filed lines'—
'In each of which he seems to shake a lance
As brandished in the eyes of ignorance'
—he is manifestly playing with his name. Fuller, too, our own Church historian, who played so often upon the names of others, has a play made upon his own in some commendatory verses prefixed to one of his books:
'Thy style is clear and white; thy very name
Speaks pureness, and adds lustre to the frame.'
He plays himself upon it in an epigram which takes the form of a prayer:
'My soul is stainèd with a dusky colour:
Let thy Son be the soap; I'll be the fuller.'