But to return to the point of digression. 'And this Pierre, or William, what is it but a sound when all is done? _Or_ three or four dashes with a pen, _so easy to be varied_, that I would fain know to whom is to be attributed the glory of so many victories, to _Guesquin_, to Glesquin, or to _Gueaguin_. And yet there would be something more in the case than in Lucian that Sigma should serve Tau with a process, for "He seeks no mean rewards." _The quere is here in good earnest. The point is_, which of _these letters_ is to be rewarded for so many sieges, battles, wounds, imprisonment, and services done to the crown of France by this famous constable. _Nicholas Denisot_ never concerned _himself_ further than _the letters of his name_, of which he has altered the _whole contexture, to build up by anagram_ the Count d'Alsinois _whom he has endowed with the glory of his poetry and painting_. [A good precedent--but here is a better one.] And the historian Suetonius looked only to the _meaning of his_; and so, cashiering his _fathers surname, Lenis_ left Tranquillus _successor to the reputation of his writings_. Who would believe that the Captain Bayard should have no honour but what he derives from the great deeds of Peter (Pierre) Terrail, [the name of Bayard--"the meaning"] and that Antonio Escalin should suffer himself, to his face, to be robbed of the honour of so many navigations, and commands at sea and land, by Captain Poulin and the Baron de la Garde. [The name of Poulin was taken from the place where he was born, De la Garde from a person who took him in his boyhood into his service.] Who hinders my groom from calling himself Pompey the Great? But, after all, what virtue, what springs are there that convey to my deceased groom, or the other Pompey (who had his head cut off in Egypt), this glorious renown, and these so much honoured flourishes of the pen?' Instructive suggestions, especially when taken in connection with the preceding items contained in this chapter, apparently so casually introduced, yet all with a stedfast bearing on this question of names, and all pointing by means of a thread of delicate sounds, and not less delicate suggestions, to another instance, in which the possibility of circumstances tending to countervail the so natural desire to appropriate to the name derived from one's ancestors, the lustre of one's deeds, is clearly demonstrated.