To the dull clod of earth, perhaps, or, again, to the truly strong-minded
nature that is beyond such influences, it can matter little that he be
called Alexander or Achilles; and once there was a man named Judas who fell
so far short of the noble associations of that name that he has changed for
all time the very sound and meaning of it.

But to him who has been endowed with imagination--that greatest boon and
greatest affliction of mankind--or whose nature is such as to crave for
models, the name he bears may become a thing portentous by the images it
conjures up of some mighty dead who bore it erstwhile and whose life
inspires to emulation.

Whatever may be accounted the general value of this premiss, at least as it
concerns my mother I shall hope to prove it apt.

They named her Monica. Why the name was chosen I have never learnt; but I
do not conceive that there was any reason for the choice other than the
taste of her parents in the matter of sounds. It is a pleasing enough
name, euphoniously considered, and beyond that--as is so commonly the
case--no considerations were taken into account.

To her, however, at once imaginative and of a feeble and dependent spirit,
the name was fateful. St. Monica was made the special object of her
devotions in girlhood, and remained so later when she became a wife. The
Life of St. Monica was the most soiled and fingered portion of an old
manuscript collection of the life histories of a score or so of saints that
was one of her dearest possessions. To render herself worthy of the name
she bore, to model her life upon that of the sainted woman who had sorrowed
and rejoiced so much in her famous offspring, became the obsession of my