CHAPTER CLXXIX.
THE SUBJECT OF ANAGRAMS CONTINUED; A TRUE OBSERVATION WHICH MANY FOR WANT OF OBSERVATION WILL NOT DISCOVER TO BE SUCH, VIZ., THAT THERE IS A LATENT SUPERSTITION IN THE MOST RATIONAL OF MEN.—LUCKY AND UNLUCKY—FITTING AND UNFITTING—ANAGRAMS, AND HOW THE DOCTOR'S TASTE IN THIS LINE WAS DERIVED FROM OUR OLD ACQUAINTANCE JOSHUA SYLVESTER.
Ha gran forza una vecchia opinione;
E bisogna grand' arte, e gran fatica,
A cavarla del capo alle persone.
BRONZINO PITTORE.
Anagrams are not likely ever again to hold so high a place among the prevalent pursuits of literature as they did in the seventeenth century, when Louis XIII. appointed the Provençal Thomas Billen to be his Royal Anagrammatist, and granted him a salary of 1200 livres. But no person will ever hit upon an apt one without feeling that degree of pleasure and surprize with which any odd coincidence is remarked. Has any one who knows Johnny the Bear heard his name thus anagrammatized without a smile? we may be sure he smiled and growled at the same time when he first heard it himself.
Might not Father Salvator Mile, and Father Louis Almerat, who were both musicians, have supposed themselves as clearly predestined to be musical, as ever seventh son of a Septimus thought himself born for the medical professions, if they had remarked what Penrose discovered for them, that their respective names, with the F. for Friar prefixed, each contained the letters of the six musical notes ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la, and not a letter more or less?
There is, and always hath been, and ever will be, a latent superstition in the most rational of men. It belongs to the weakness and dependence of human nature. Believing as the scriptures teach us to believe, that signs and tokens have been vouchsafed in many cases, is it to be wondered at that we seek for them sometimes in our moods of fancy, or that they suggest themselves to us in our fears and our distress? Men may cast off religion and extinguish their conscience without ridding themselves of this innate and inherent tendency.
Proper names have all in their origin been significant in all languages. It was easy for men who brooded over their own imaginations, to conceive that they might contain in their elements a more recondite, and perhaps, fatidical signification; and the same turn or twist of mind which led the Cabbalists to their extravagant speculations have taken this direction, when confined within the limits of languages which have no supernatural pretensions. But no serious importance was attached to such things, except by persons whose intellects were in some degree deranged. They were sought for chiefly as an acceptable form of compliment, sometimes in self-complacency of the most offensive kind, and sometimes for the sting which they might carry with them. Lycophron is said to have been the inventor of this trifling.