ON METONYMS. 37 



offer our collection simply as a contribution to a more complete list, for 

 the use and information of the student who has occasion to consult tho 

 original authorities for the civil and literary history of the 16th cen- 

 tury; and under correction, for we have not been able, in every 

 instance, to recover the source of our notes. Hallam, Whewell, 

 Disraeli, Dibdin and Brunet furnished us with some of them. Our 

 translated names will be those which, like the instances already 

 described, convey in a Latinised or Grecised form the sense, real or 

 supposed, or approximated to, of the vernacular name. Our quasi- 

 translated names will embrace such as have, for convenience, been 

 moulded into a Latin form, and have assumed in the process a shape 

 under which the vernacular form is not, at first sight, readily recog- 

 nised ; as, for example, Linnaeus, for Linne, Grotius for de Groot. 



At the period of the ' Revival of Letters,' when the Latin and Greek 

 tongues came again to be familiarly understood among the literary men 

 of Western Europe, and to be used by them with elegance in the 

 writing of history and other works, and in correspondence and even 

 common conversation with each other, it was found that the proper 

 names of persons (as also of places) constituted, in many instances, 

 sounds harsh to the ear, and forms uncouth to the eye, in the midst of 

 the flow and harmony of the lately-revived, so-called classical languages. 

 The plan was consequently soon adopted of softening and harmonising 

 the names required to be used, either by translating them according to 

 their etymology, or by resuming the forms of the same names as they 

 were before becoming barbarised in the fourth and fifth centuries, or 

 by suffixing convenient terminations. 



For this smoothing-down of rough foreign proper names there was 

 the authority and example of the great authors whose works wore again 

 becoming widely known. The Greek historians moulded to their own 

 vocal organs the names of Persian and other Asiatic persons and places. 

 Livy did the same with Etrurian, Oscan and Phoenician names. Caesar 

 and Tacitus did the same with places and persons in the West, the 

 writers in each instance preserving in the metonym, material of high 

 value now to the ethnologist and comparative philologist. 



The fastidiousness of taste generated by the newly-revived studies 

 carried men too far \Y.hen, as in some of the literary clubs or academies 

 in Italy, they adopted the custom of addressing each other by venera- 

 ble names that did not, even in sound, belong to them : just as, centu- 

 ries before, under the influence of another partial 'revival of letters,' 



