Shenstone used to bless his good fortune that his name was not obnoxious to a pun. He would not have liked to have been complimented in the same strain as a certain Mr. Pegge was by an old epigrammatist. What wonder if my friendship's force doth last Firm to your goodness? You have pegg'd it fast. Little could he foresee, as Dr. Southey has observed that it was obnoxious to a rhyme in French English. In the gardens of Ermenonville M. placed this inscription to his honour. This plain stone To William Shenstone. In his writings he display'd A mind natural; At Leasowes he laid Arcadian greens rural. Poor Shenstone hardly appears more ridiculous in the frontispiece to his own works, where, in the heroic attitude of a poet who has won the prize and is about to receive the crown, he stands before Apollo in a shirt and boa, as destitute of another less dispensible part of dress as Adam in Eden, but like Adam when innocent, not ashamed: while the shirtless God holding a lyre in one hand prepares with the other to place a wreath of bay upon the brow of his delighted votary. The father of Sir Joshua Reynolds fancied that if he gave his son an uncommon Christian name, it might be the means of bettering his fortune; and therefore he had him christened Joshua. It does not appear however that the name ever proved as convenient to the great painter as it did to Joshua Barnes. He to whose Barnesian labours Homer and Queen Esther, and King Edward III. bear witness, was a good man and a good scholar, and a rich widow who not imprudently inferred that he would make a good husband, gave him an opportunity by observing to him one day that Joshua made the Sun and Moon stand still, and significantly adding that nothing could resist Joshua. The hint was not thrown away;—and he never had cause to repent that he had taken, nor she that she had given it. A Spanish gentleman who made it his pastime to write books of chivalry, being to bring into his work a furious Giant, went many days devising a name which might in all points be answerable to his fierceness, neither could he light upon any; till playing one day at cards in his friend's house, he heard the master of the house say to the boy—muchacho—_tra qui tantos_. As soon as he heard Traquitantos he laid down his cards and said that now he had found a name which would fit well for his Giant.[2] [Footnote 2: HUARTE.] I know not whether it was the happy-minded author of the Worthies and the Church History of Britain who proposed as an epitaph for himself the words “Fuller's Earth,” or whether some one proposed it for him. But it is in his own style of thought and feeling. Nor has it any unbeseeming levity, like this which is among Browne's poems. Here lieth in sooth Honest John Tooth, Whom Death on a day From us drew away. Or this upon a Mr. Button, Here lieth one, God rest his soul Whose grave is but a button-hole.