"He" had four brothers to keep him in countenance, all with worse names than his: Washington, Philip Massasoit, Scipio, and Hiram Yaw Byron! There was the excuse, in this last name, of its being a family one, as far as Yaw went; but----However, as I said, language is wholly inadequate and weak for some purposes. There was a lower deep than America,--that was some comfort. Hiram Yaw wasn't sent to college, but to Ashtabula, wherever that is, and I never wish to see him. But to college was America sent,--to be "hazed," and taunted, and called "E Plury," and his beak and claws inquired after, through the freshman year. I never knew how he went through,--I mean, with what feelings. Of course, he was the first scholar. But that, even, must have been but a small consolation. The worst of all was, he was sensitive about his name,--whether because it had been used to torment him, and so, like poor worn-out Nessus, he wrapped more closely his poisoned scarf, (I like scarf better than shirt,)--or whether he had, in the course of his law-studies and men-studies, come to think it really mattered very little what a man's name was in the beginning; at all events, he had no notion of dismissing his own. My own secret hope had been, that, by an Act of the Legislature, which that very season had changed Pontifex Parker to Charles Alfred Parker, Mr. Sampson might be accommodated with a name less unspeakably national. Dear me! Alfred, Arthur, Albert,--if he must begin with A. "A was an Archer, and shot at a frog." I should even prefer Archer. It needn't be Insatiate Archer. So I kept turning over and over the painful subject, one evening,--I mean, of course, in my mind, for I had not really broached this matter of legislative action. Luckily, "he" had brought in the new edition of George Herbert's Works. We were reading aloud, and "he" read the chapter of "The Parson in Sacraments." At the foot was an extract from "The Parish Register" of Crabbe, which he read, unconscious of the way in which I mentally applied it. Indeed, I think he scarcely thought of his own name at that time. But I did, twenty-four times in every day. This was the note:-- "Pride lives with all; strange names our rustics give To helpless infants, that their own may live; Pleased to be known, they'll some attention claim, And find some by-way to the house of fame. 'Why Lonicera wilt thou name thy child?' I asked the gardener's wife, in accents mild. 'We have a right,' replied the sturdy dame; And Lonicera was the infant's name."