The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1849-10-09 00:00:00

PISTOLS

"There are about a score or so of men in the House of Com-
mons who are as partial to Horace as James I. was to tobacco ;
and equally hateful as the smoke of the weed was to the pedan-
tic king, so hateful to the honourable members are quotations
from the Latin poets. These burly, pompous gentlemen, who
stalk up the floor of the house as though the house derived all
its dignity from their presence—who take their seats with that
Peculiar air and importance which characterises a London
journeyman in tin Islington tealarden—who are so obtuse to
everything that is said to them in their vernacular tongue, and
who rail the loudest against whatever is right in principle and
sound in argument—it is amusing to see how constantly they
quail under an apt quotation from Horace—how the eye twinkles
and the lips writhe under the sound of those few cabalistic
words, the meaning of which. they are tortured by, in the
smiles they see and the laughter they hear. But, besides
these, there are thousands and tens of thousands of men in
the kingdom to whom the caustic sayings of Horace are es-
pecially distasteful. Every man who is in a false position in
society loathes the poet : all who appear to others what they
are not in themselves—all who live upon delusions and who
dread discoveries—all, in fact, who are cheats and in their
several ways impostors dread any application of the satirical
poet's verses to their own person and cases.
" We consider Horace, therefore, to be more than any other
writer, tit, most useful ally and the best'protection to a gentle-
man in his daily walk through life. and in his general inter-
course with the world. The ignorant are awed by the uncouth
words they hear; the intrusive are repelled, and the insolent
are cowed, by the biting sarcasms that eighteen hundred years
since exposed to the laughter of Rome a set as impertinent as
themselves; and as duelling is in great disfavour with the
public, and is really getting out of fashion altogether in the
fashionable world, every man must guard himself as he best
can against the knaves that would injure him and the bullies
who would insult him. The time was when a long sword or a
brace of pistols served very effectually as checks to insulting
words and bad manners; but scorn and disgust have together
driven these much out of disuse; for, since the apprentice of
Ludgate-hill sent his challenge to the apprentice of Cheapside,
and then got a friend to talk openly about it and to get the
magistrate to interfere in it, and since sisters' husbands from
the most sordid motives levelled their deadly weapons at each
other's breasts, the public loathe duels, and are generally of
one accord to think ill of all who engage in them—equally of
him who accepts a challenge as of him who sends it, a chal-
lenge being usually the last resort of the swindler and gambler
—of the passionate and the quarrelsome—of the profligate and
the coward—of the bully and the braggart. Of necessity, of
very necessity, every gentleman must occasionally meet in
society with others who are not gentlemen ; but he has a strong
guard about him, and a very potent weapon ever with him, who
has it ever in his power to make the men of no principles and
the men of bad manners notoriously ridiculous, or odious, or
contemptible, by directing against them some of the smart
sayings of Horace. Ridicule and not wrath, wit and not bul-
lets, the lyric poet and not cold steel, are the best defensive
weapons a gentleman can use against the aggressions of the
intrusive, the insolence of the impertinent, and the conceit of
the fool:

Omnes hi metuunt versus, odere poetam."

CURIOUS ORIGIN OF SURNAMES.
" Some names are sobriquets from some personal peculiarity,
as Skyp, Standeven, Golightly ; or from some particular taste,
as Drinkwater, Drinkdregs. Paybody was probably an honest
man who did pay his way when others around him did not;
while Swindles and Bilk were probably arrant cheats. There
was an odd collection of names on the books of Pembroke
College, Oxford, in the year 1832, as Guppy, Maingy, Bubb,
and Grubb, which are scarcely so intelligible as Cram, Chew,
Rideout, Gotobed. In some instances men are found to sub-
mit to bear a new name imposed upon them by their neigh-
bours. Thus, the editor knew a man whose name was John-
son, but, as he was a dealer in pigs, the people called him Pig.
man, and Pigman he calls himself, and this name may to this
day be seen over the door of the public-house which the man
keeps in Staftbrdshire. Another man who grew excellent po-
tatoes was called by his neighbours Taterjohn, like him who,
having a large orchard, was called Applejohn. Rottenberyng,
a name in Hull, was no doubt given to a dishonest dealer in
fish ; but Blackmonster ought to be amended outright, since
his name was derived from Blancliminster, the white monastery.
Godskin is the name of a man who was continually crying out
Odsbodikins. But a man may gain to himself a name from
one saying equally as from a thousand. Thus, the parish clerk
of Longford, near Wellington was called Redcock for many
years before his death from having one Sunday slept in church,
and, dreaming that he was at a cock-fight, he bawled out "a
shilling upon the red cock," and the family are called Red-
cocks to this day. Some men are truly unfortunate in their
names, and no ingenuity in man can improve them. Thus, a
gentleman whose father's name was Bear and whose mother's
maiden name was Savage had both imposed upon him at his
baptism, and Savage Bear is to this hour his name."