The first signs of serious change betrayed themselves at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign. The English Bible rested in English hands. But it was a new book. Names familiar enough in 1877, but probably heard of for the first time in 1577, were drawn forth from their concealment, and made to subserve the new impulse of the nation. It was then that the minister at the font had to begin registering such names as “Abacucke Harman,” “Sydrach Sympson,” “Phenenna Salmon,” “Gamaliel Capell,” “Archelaus Gifford,” “Melchizedek Payne,” “Dyna Bocher,” or “Zebulon Clerke.” It was as if the Bible were a new country full of verdant tracks, and as they passed through each plucked the flower that pleased him most. By the time King James came to the throne, “Phineas,” “Philemon,” “Uriah,” “Aquila,” “Priscilla,” and “Hilkiah” had become the rage. Before he died, Harry had fallen into neglect, Ralph and Guy were utterly despised, and names like Hamlet, or Hamnet (Shakespear’s son was Hamnet), or Avice, or Douce, or Warin, or Drew, or Fulke, had gone down like sodden logs in a stagnant pool. Whether they will ever come into use again is very doubtful. Only national caprice can do it; but that, we know, can do anything. That Avice, so pretty and simple as it is, should have disappeared, I cannot but think a national loss. By the time of Charles the First, the national taste had gone a degree further. It becomes positively amusing to study the registers of this period. It had evidently become a point of respectability among certain classes of the community to select for their children the rarest names of Scripture. John, Nicholas, Bartholomew, Thomas, and Peter, though Scriptural, were tabooed; a stain rested on them, as having been in the Calendar during centuries of popish superstition. In fact, the Apostles were turned out for having kept bad company. Many seemed to have rested their claim to thorough knowledge of the Bible upon the rarity of the name they had discovered in its pages. Thus I find “Ebedmeleck Gastrell,” whose Christian name only occurs once in the Scriptures (Jer. xxxviii. 8). “Epaphroditus Houghton,” “Othniell Haggat,” “Apphia Scott,” “Tryphena Gode,” “Bezaliel Peachie,” are cases in point. If a child were styled by a new, quaint, unheard-of title, as a matter of course it was assumed to be from the Bible. From the appearance of such a name as “Michellaliell,” I fancy tricks of this kind were common.