and propriety; you shall find that tender, doting parents, living in some Horridville or other, will deliberately, and without a shadow of compunction, devote their helpless offspring to lasting ridicule, by condemning the innocent child to carry through the world some pompous, heroic appellation, often misspelt and mispronounced to boot; thus rendering him for life a sort of peripatetic caricature, an ambulatory laughing-stock, rather than call him Peter or John, as becomes an honest man.
It is true we are not entirely without good names; but a dozen which are thoroughly ridiculous, would be thought too many in most countries, and unfortunately, with us such may be counted by the hundred. By a stroke of good luck, the States are, with some exceptions, well named. Of the original thirteen, two only bore Indian names: Massachusetts and Connecticut; six, as we all remember, were taken from royal personages: Virginia, from Queen Bess; Maryland, from Henrietta Maria, the French wife of Charles I.; New York, from the duchy of James II.; Georgia, called by Gen. Oglethorpe after George II., and the two Carolinas, which, although the refuge of many Huguenot families, so strangely recall the cruel Charles IX. and the wicked butchery of St. Bartholomew's. Of the remaining three, two were named after private individuals—New Jersey, from the birth-place of its proprietor, Sir George Carteret, and Pennsylvania, from the celebrated Quaker, while New Hampshire recalled an English county; Maine, the former satellite of Massachusetts, was named by the French colonists after the fertile province on the banks of the Loire, and Vermont, which stood in the same relation to New York, received its French title from the fancy of Young, one of the earliest of our American poets, who wrote “The Conquest of
