Democratic Sentinel, Volume 18, Number 15, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 April 1894 — Adopted Names. [ARTICLE]

Adopted Names.

Authors are apt to become very fanciful about their names, as soon as the latter have received public approbation. J. B. Jeaffreson says that his friend, William Stigand, was uneasy about his surname until he had changed the spelling of It, so that it stands thus on the title-page of one book and “Stigant” cn another. Will-

lam Hepworth Dixon did not receive his middle name from bis parents, but assumed it at his own discretion. Charley Shirley Brooks, formerly editor of Punch, had no right, except that <jf adoption, to his middle name; and perhaps, had he foreseen that the satirical humor of the day would convert it into “Shallow,” would have been willing to remain plain Brooks.” , , Abraham Hayward a literary veteran, detested his own Christian name, but an essayist who was ignorant of the fact insisted on addressing him by it in an open letter on some public affair. Mr. Hayward died in a few months, and a remorseless joker worried the essayist by declar tng that the deceased had merely been killed by this excessive use of his Christian name. George Henry Tfcornbury, who has done such good work in general literature, was once asked why he had taken to calling himself “Walter.” “As my ballads have made so decided a hit,” he explained, “I have decided to call myself Walter altogether.” The questioner smiled, and Thornbury added: “Surely you must see that Hen-e-r-y. Hen-e-r-y, is not a flt name for a writer of ballads, and that George is almost as bad, though no doubt Byron was a George. Walter is a much better name for a poet; so henceforth be good enough to speak to me and think of me as Walter.” A name seems so Irrevocable a fact to some of us that we do not stop to consider how recently certain famous ones have been changed or modified. The Alcotts were not originally Alcott, but Alcock; and the Brontes, of good and great memory, were, not so many generations before the day of the famous Charlotte, an Irish family named Prunty. And thus have decided or eccentric men modified the spelling of their names, as they might change the fashion of their beards.