“Our little Isis gives us infinite delight; she thrives splendidly. Her mamma has carried her point by giving her the name of Anna. I foresaw that I should furnish a subject for witticisms, in the name of Isis, to those people in Berlin who honor us with their attention. It is necessary to throw them a few crumbs of that sort from time to time, so that they may not devise something worse. I was as little able to find any serious scandal in it as was the excellent Jonas who administered the baptism. Scarcely any one keeps to the Calendar for the sake of the Calendar itself, and I should much prefer Friedhelm and Maxhelene, the children’s names recently given by Ranke, to the Fides, Spes and Charitas, or Titus, Ptolemeus, Sosthenes, Lot, Habakkuk, Methuselah, etc., of the Calendar. Yet Ranke comes very near to offending against the only limitation which I should admit; that of not choosing ludicrous names. Take Erica, Berenice, (that is Veronica,) or Emin, which is the name of young Wildenbruch, the elder brother of the talented poet Ernest von Wildenbruch; no one has anything against such names as these and innumerable others, though they too are as little in the Calendar, and have as little Christian precedent, as a hundred thousand ἁπαξ λεγόμευα from the birth of Christ to our time, in all Christian countries. Besides, Isis, to every one who knows the Egyptian goddess, is a very honorable name, which can only recall the author of all good, a faithful spouse and sister, the model and recognized prototype of all queens. What the Romans made of her need trouble us as little as their opinion of the image of Jehovah in the Jewish temple, and can as little cast suspicion upon her as can the Christianity of the Königsberg impostors upon the name of Christian. If, in another year, I have a boy to baptize I shall not be obliged to call him Apis, as Osiris is already received in the Christian Calendar, under a much more beautiful form as Onophrius.[94] But I will take care not to impose upon him the equally Christian name of the Typhon, “Set.” I should like to see any one who would not as utterly fail in any theory for the giving of Christian names, as did, not long since, the law forbidding the Jews to bear Christian names. But, on the other hand, I consider it very wise to give the clergy a certain freedom to exclude unsuitable, scandalous names of every kind, according to their own honest judgment.” Little Anna was followed by a second girl, Elizabeth,[95] and the latter by four boys, to the delight of the grandfather in Naumburg. For although he had been blessed with six sons and three daughters, strangely enough, he had had bestowed upon him no other “Lepsius” grandchildren that those who sprung from the marriage of his son Richard.