The earliest specimens of this peculiar spirit will be found in the reign of Elizabeth—that is, within a score of years or so of the Reformation and the gift of an open English Bible; so we must not suppose it was wholly an institution of what we may term the Cromwellian period. It reached its climax then, nothing more. In the Elizabethan “Proceedings in Chancery” may be seen such names as Virtue Hunt, Temperance Dowlande,—Temperance was one of our most popular names for a hundred and fifty years,—Charitie Bowes, and Lamentation Chapman. Lamentation would easily be affixed to a child whose mother had died in childbirth. Ichabod has often been given for a like reason. On the contrary, “Comfort” would be readily seized upon under circumstances of Christian or parental joy. The other day I was in Tewkesbury Abbey, now undergoing restoration, and, as is my wont, I began ferreting for peculiar names. In a churchyard I instinctively walk like a dog with my nose to the ground. Almost immediately, I came across two “Comforts,”—“Comfort, wife of Abram Farren, died Aug. 24th, 1720,” and “Comfort Pearce, died Nov. 17th, 1715;” the latter was granddaughter of the former. Miss Holt, whose “Mistress Margery” and other sound and thoroughly well-written stories will have been read by most of my readers, told me not long ago that she had seen in the register of St. James’s, Piccadilly, the following entries:—“Repentance Tompson,” “Loving Bell,” “Obedience Clark,” and “Unity Thornton”; “Nazareth Rudde,” also, was contained in the same record. This reminds me of “Jerrico Segrave” in a Derbyshire record. In that county it was very possible for Bible place-names to be thus incorporated into personal nomenclature. Among the ruder peasantry it was a common custom,—a custom dating from the Reformation,—to have their child baptized by the first name the eye lighted on after the parent had let the family Bible fall open upon the table. A clergyman not long ago, asking in the Baptismal Service “What name?” received the whispered rejoinder, “Ramoth Gilead.” Naturally enough, he inquired, _sotto voce_, “A boy or a girl?” A curious instance of this general class is to be found in the case of Frewen, Archbishop of York, who died in 1664. He was son of a Puritan minister in Sussex; his Christian name was “Accepted,” and his younger brother was “Thankfull.” It is from this epoch that we must date the origin of some of our prettiest, if not now most popular, names for girls: “Grace,” “Faith,” “Hope,” “Charity,” “Truth,” and “Prudence.” All these have survived the era in which they, and a hundred longer and less simple terms, were introduced; and if they are now getting out of favour, it is only one more proof that the fashions in detail, as well as the fashions generally, of this world, undergo silent, it may be, but inevitable change.