The Latin version which, you must know, is of great antiquity, and was made the basis of Jerom’s, about the middle of the fourth century, renders this proverb in a remarkable manner. _Sicut qui mittit lapidem in acervum Mercurii; ita qui tribuit insipienti honorem._ As he that casts a stone on the _heap of Mercury_, &c. &c. Now, bearing in mind that stones are at this day thrown upon certain graves in Spain; that, according to the passage in Shakspeare, a similar custom seems to have prevailed in other parts of Europe; and that Jerom believed he rendered the spirit of the Hebrew proverb by translating the word which the English Divines doubted, whether to construe _a sling_, or _a heap of stones_, by the phrase, _acervus Mercurii_; a deity, whose statues were frequently placed over sepulchres among the Romans--bearing all this in mind, I say, it appears to me that the custom of covering some graves with stones thrown at random, must have existed in the time of the writer of the Proverbs. Perhaps I may be allowed to conjecture that it originated in the punishment of stoning, so common among the Jews; that passengers flung stones, as a mark of abhorrence, on the heap which hid the body of the criminal; that the primitive Christians, many of whom were Jews, followed the same method of shewing their horror of heathen tombs, till those places came to be known, in Jerom’s time, by the appellation of _heaps of Mercury_; that modern Christians applied the same custom to the graves of such as had been deemed unworthy of consecrated ground; and, finally, that the frequency of highway robberies and murders in Spain detached the custom from the idea of crime, and softened a mark of detestation into one of prayer and intercession for the unfortunate victim. SPANISH CHRISTIAN NAMES. The extraordinary devotion of the Catholics, especially in this country, to the Virgin Mary, and the notion, supported by the clergy, that as many Saints as have their names given to a child at baptism, are, in some degree, engaged to take it under their protection, occasion a national peculiarity not unworthy of remark. In the first place few have less than half a dozen names entered in the parish register, a list of which is given to the priest that he may read them out in the act of christening the child. It would be difficult indeed, under these circumstances, for most people to know exactly their own names, especially if, like myself, they have been favoured with _eleven_. The custom of the country, however, allows every individual to forget all but the first in the list. In our devotion to the Virgin, we have hitherto avoided the strange solecism of the French _Monsieur Marie_, though almost every Spaniard has _Maria_ for a second name.