coloured foreigner, and then, like a fool,
instead of managing him, aggravates him into
smothering her. Ah! Shakespeare was a great
man, and knew our sex, and was not afraid
to show he knew it. What a blessing it
would be, if some of his literary brethren, in
modern times, could muster courage enough
to follow his example!

I have fifty different things to say, but I
shall bring myself to a conclusion by only
mentioning one of them. If it would at all
contribute towards forwarding the literary
reform that I advocate, to make a present of
the characters of Miss Sticker and Mrs.
Tincklepaw, to the writers in this journal,
I shall be delighted to abandon all right of
proprietorship in those two odious women.
At the same time, I think it fair to
explain that when I speak of the writers in
Household Words, I mean the gentlemen-
writers only. I wish to say nothing uncivil
to the lady-contributors (whose effusions may,
by the rule of contraries, be exceedingly
agreeable to male reads); but I positively
forbid them to lay hands upon my two
characters. I am charmed to be of use to the
men, in a literary point of view, but I decline
altogether to mix myself up with the women.
There need be no fear of offending them by
printing this candid expression of my
intentions. Depend on it, they will all declare,
on their sides, that they would much rather
have nothing to do with me.

NAMES.

I HAVE been bred up in a very respectable
and genteel manner, with a boarding-school
education, a fair share of accomplishments, a
respect for dignities, a horror of low
company, a proper admiration for my superiors,
and a decent contempt of my inferiors. I do
not like the lower orders—the working-
classes, or whatever you choose to call them;
I consider them very bad examples to place
before my children: very dirty, very much
inclined to tobacco, and very encroaching; in
fact, to use a vulgar but very expressive term,
they are persons, in my private opinion, who
when given an inch, will take an ell. I
certainly think that literature of the present
day has done a great and irreparable injury,
in contributing to foster in the minds of these
persons and overweening sense of their own
importance. Books are not now written in
the style that I approve of: the language is
clear and understandable to the meanest
capacity—a very poor and vulgar quality—
and the characters are drawn from certain
classes of society that ought to be ignored by
genteel people, instead of being paraded in
the alluring pages of the novelist. They are
encourage to set up a cry for equal rights,
whatever that may mean; and I fully expect
some day to be turned out of my house, and
to have my goods and chattels divided by a
pack of hungry socialists in the gutter.

To have one's property and one's personal
comfort endangered, is bad enough; but
what shall we say to an organised attack
upon our names—an attempt to deprive
our most cherished and aristocratic appellations
of the nobility and antiquity which are
their ornament and their right, and to raise
in their place a number of low, common
and vulgar titles? Names that I have been
often chastised for using when a child, are
now pretended to be traced to ancient
Scandinavian sources—far beyond our own
Conqueror, of whom we are all so justly proud—
up amongst remote Angles, Saxons, Jutes,
and Frisians. Mr. Kemble contributed his
share towards this desecration; also Mr.
Lower, and Mr. Arthur, an American: but
another and a later author, Mr. Ferguson,
has gone beyond all these in the process of
heaping ridicule upon dignities.

The first absurd association that I find is
the identity of Manfred with Mangles (both
compounds of Man); the solemn, gloomy
Byronic creation placed in juxtaposition
with a very useful but a very common
domestic instrument. Next, I am unblushingly
told, that those are very coarse, vulgar
names of Betty, Sall, and Moll, are not
properly women's titles, but very ancient men's
names. Brown, I am told (the very
numerous and common-place Brown) is the same
as the Scandinavian Odin, the father of the
Gods. Veal, Wilkes (and liberty), Willikins
or Villikins (and his Dinah), have all the
same meaning and all spring from one root.
Fancy a political cry of Veal and liberty!
Thoroughgood and Turpin, although
seemingly very wide asunder, and both the same;
Homer is reduced to Hammer; and Balder,
the wisest of the Northern gods, is identical
with Fooley. Sibthorp is from Sif, the wife
of Thor, and the same as Sieveking; Anne is
an ancient man's name; Bill (the name of our
old gardener, though I was never allowed to
call him by it) turns out to be the title of a
minor goddess of the Scandinavian
mythology,—a child fabled to have been snatched
up and placed in the moon. People must be
in a very low social condition indeed, who
can bring themselves to worship a goddess
with such a name. It is the same as
Billiard, Pill, and Pillow; but is not, of course,
on any account, to be considered as a
reduction of William. Eaton, Etty, and
Hannibal, may be called Rice, Thirst, Tosswell,
Troll, and Rum, without violating any of the
proprieties of the accommodating Northern
languages. Bacchus is reduced to Backhouse
—perhaps a back-garden;  and Potts and
Kettles are stated in this very dangerous
book to be more ancient than the proudest
Norman names!

King, Connell, Coney, Coningby, and a
host of others, are hashed up together, as
springing from the same root;  and the last
in the list, Kinchin, which I am told, upon
very good authority, is utter thieves' slang