NAMES. 
479 
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 mis- 
pronounced to boot ; thus rendering him for life a sort of peripa- 
tetic 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 Caro- 
linas, which, although the refuge of many Huguenot famihes, 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 cele- 
l^rated Quaker, while New Hampshire recalled an Enghsh 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 
