4 ISAAC COMNENUS.
That resemblance which was strong in childhood, lessened as the child grew up; for Margaret's countenance had acquired a cast of meek melancholy during those years in which the bread of bitterness had been her portion; and when hope came to her, it was that “hope deferred” which takes from the cheek its bloom, even when the heart instead of being made sick, is sustained by it. But no unhappy circumstances depressed the constitutional buoyancy of her daughter's spirits. Deborah brought into the world the happiest of all nature's endowments, an easy temper and a light heart. Resemblant therefore as the features were, the dissimilitude of expression was more apparent; and when Leonard contrasted in thought the sunshine of hilarity that lit up his daughter's face, with the sort of moonlight loveliness which had given a serene and saint-like character to her mother's, he wished to persuade himself that as the early translation of the one seemed to have been thus prefigured, the other might be destined to live for the happiness of others till a good old age, while length of years in their course should ripen her for heaven.
CHAPTER LXXX.
OBSERVATIONS WHICH SHEW THAT WHATEVER PRIDE MEN MAY TAKE IN THE APPELLATIONS THEY ACQUIRE IN THEIR PROGRESS THROUGH THE WORLD, THEIR DEAREST NAME DIES BEFORE THEM.
—Thus they who reach
Grey hairs, die piecemeal.
SOUTHEY.
The name of Leonard must now be dropt as we proceed. Some of the South-American tribes, among whom the Jesuits laboured with such exemplary zeal, and who take their personal appellations, (as most names were originally derived,) from beasts, birds, plants and other visible objects, abolish upon the death of every individual the name by which he was called, and invent another for the thing from which it was taken, so that their language, owing to this curiously inconvenient custom, is in a state of continual change. An abolition almost as complete with regard to the person had taken place in the present instance. The name, Leonard, was consecrated to him by all his dearest and fondest recollections. He had been known by it on his mother's knees, and in the humble cottage of that aunt who had been to him a second mother; and by the wife of his bosom, his first, last, and only love. Margaret had never spoken to him, never thought of him, by any other name. From the hour of her death no human voice ever addressed him by it again. He never heard himself so called, except in dreams. It existed only in the dead letter; he signed it mechanically in the course of business, but it had ceased to be a living name.
Men willingly prefix a handle to their names, and tack on to them any two or more honorary letters of the alphabet as a tail; they drop their surnames for a dignity, and change them for an estate or a title. They are pleased to be Doctor'd and Professor'd; to be Captain'd, Major'd, Colonel'd, General'd, or Admiral'd;—to be Sir John'd, my-Lorded, or your-Graced. “You and I,” says Cranmer in his Answer to Gardiner's book upon Transubstantiation—“you and I were delivered from our surnames when we were consecrated Bishops; sithence which time we have so commonly been used of all men to be called Bishops, you of Winchester, and I of Canterbury, that the most part of the people know not that your name is Gardiner, and mine Cranmer. And I pray God, that we being called to the name of Lords, have not forgotten our own baser estates, that once we were simple squires!” But the emotion with which the most successful suitor of Fortune hears himself first addressed by a new and honourable title, conferred upon him for his public deserts, touches his heart less, (if that heart be sound at the core,) than when after long absence, some one who is privileged so to use it, accosts him by his christian name,—that household name which he has never heard but from his nearest relations, and his old familiar friends. By this it is that we are known to all around us in childhood; it is used only by our parents and our nearest kin when that stage is past; and as they drop off, it dies as to its oral uses with them.