DERIVATION OF HONORARY TITLES. Y3 



dying forms of what were once living facts. From these 

 names, God, Father, Lord, Divinity, originally belonging 

 to the God-king, and afterwards to God and the king, the 

 derivation of our commonest titles of respect is clearly 

 traceable. 



There is reason to think that these titles were originally 

 proper names. Not only do we see among the Egyptians, 

 where Pharaoh was synonymous with king, and among the 

 Romans, where to be Coesar, meant to be Emperor, that 

 the proper names of the greatest men were transferred to 

 their successors, and so became class names ; but in the 

 Scandinavian mythology we may trace a human title of 

 honour up to the proper name of a divine personage. In 

 Anglo-Saxon healdor^ or haldor^ means Lord j and Balder 

 is the name of the favourite of Odin's sons — the gods who 

 with him constitute the Teutonic Pantheon. How these 

 names of honour became general is easily understood. 

 The relatives of the primitive kings — the grandees de- 

 scribed by Selden as having names formed on those of the 

 gods, and shown by this to be members of the divine race 

 . — necessarily shared in the epithets, such as Lord^ descrip- 

 tive of superhuman relationships and nature. Their ever- 

 multiplying offspring inheriting these, gradually rendered 

 them comparatively common. And then they came to be 

 applied to every man of power : partly from the fact that, 

 in these early days when men conceived divinity simply as 

 a stronger kind of humanity, great persons could be called 

 by divine epithets with but little exaggeration ; partly from 

 the fact that the unusually potent were apt to be consid- 

 ered as unrecognized or illegitimate descendants of " the 

 strong, the destroyer, the powerful one ;" and partly, also, 

 from comiDliment and the desire to j^ropitiate. 



Progressively as superstition diminished, this last be- 

 came the sole cause. And if we remember that it is the 

 nature of compliment, as we daily hear it, to attribute 

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