name imports something good, his adversary will lay hold of the name,
will seek to bring out a real contradiction between the name and the
bearer of the name, so that he shall appear as one presenting himself
under false colours, affecting a merit which he does not really possess.
Examples of this abound. There was one Vigilantius in the early
Church;--his name might be interpreted 'The Watchful.' He was at issue
with St. Jerome about certain vigils; these he thought perilous to
Christian morality, while Jerome was a very eager promoter of them; who
instantly gave a turn to his name, and proclaimed that he, the enemy of
these watches, the partisan of slumber and sloth, should have been not
Vigilantius or The Watcher, but 'Dormitantius' or The Sleeper rather.
Felix, Bishop of Urgel, a chief champion in the eighth century of the
Adoptianist heresy, is constantly 'Infelix' in the writings of his
adversary Alcuin. The Spanish peasantry during the Peninsular War would
not hear of Bonaparte, but changed the name to 'Malaparte,' as
designating far better the perfidious kidnapper of their king and enemy
of their independence. It will be seen then that Aeschylus is most true
to nature, when in his _Prometheus Bound_ he makes Strength tauntingly
to remind Prometheus, or The Prudent, how ill his name and the lot
which he has made for himself agreed, bound as he is with adamantine
chains to his rock, and bound, as it might seem, for ever. When
Napoleon said of Count Lobau, whose proper name was Mouton, 'Mon mouton
c'est un lion,' it was the same instinct at work, though working from
an opposite point. It made itself felt no less in the bitter irony
which gave to the second of the Ptolemies, the brother-murdering king,
the title of Philadelphus.

But more frequent still is this hostile use of names, this attempt to
place them and their owners in the most intimate connexion, to make, so
to speak, the man answerable for his name, where the name does not thus