own heraldry and sticks a surname like a burr upon us.  The nickname is the idiom of nomenclature.  The sponsorial appellation is generally meaningless, fished piously out of Scripture or profanely out of plays and novels, or given with an eye to future legacies, or for some equally insufficient reason apart from the name itself.  So that the gentleman who named his children One, Two, and Three, was only reducing to its lowest term the prevailing practice.  But the nickname abides.  It has its hold in affection.  When the “old boys” come together in Gore Hall at their semi-centennial Commencement, or the “Puds” or “Pores” get together after long absence, it is not to inquire what has become of the Rev. Dr. Heavysterne or his Honor Littleton Coke, but it is, “Who knows where Hockey Jones is?” and “Did Dandy Glover really die in India?” and “Let us go and call upon Old Sykes” or “Old Roots” or “Old Conic-Sections,”—­thus meaning to designate Professor——­, LL.D., A.A.S., F.R.S., etc.  A college president who had no nickname would prove himself, ipso facto, unfit for his post.  It is only dreadfully affected people who talk of “Tully”; the sensible all cling to the familiar “Chick-Pea” or Cicero, by which the wart-faced orator was distinguished.  For it is not the boys only, but all American men, who love nicknames, the idioms of nomenclature.  The first thing which is done, after a nominating convention has made its platform and balloted for its candidates, is to discover or invent a nickname:  Old Hickory, Tippecanoe, The Little Giant, The Little Magician, The Mill-Boy of the Slashes, Honest John, Harry of the West, Black Dan, Old Buck, Old Rough and Ready.  A “good name” is a tower of strength and many votes.

And not only with candidates for office, the spots on whose “white garments” are eagerly sought for and labelled, but in the names of places and classes the principle prevails, the democratic or Saxon tongue gets the advantage.  Thus, we have for our states, cities, and ships-of-war the title of fondness which drives out the legal title of ceremony.  Are we not “Yankees” to the world, though to the diplomatists “citizens of the United States of America”?  We have a Union made up upon the map of Maine, New Hampshire, etc., to California; we have another in the newspapers, composed of the Lumber State, the Granite State, the Green-Mountain State, the Nutmeg State, the Empire State, the Keystone State, the Blue Hen, the Old Dominion, of Hoosiers, Crackers, Suckers, Badgers, Wolverines, the Palmetto State, and Eldorado.  We have the Crescent City, the Quaker City, the Empire City, the Forest City, the Monumental City, the City of Magnificent Distances.  We hear of Old Ironsides sent to the Mediterranean to relieve the Old Tea-Wagon, ordered home.  Everywhere there obtains the Papal principle of taking a new title upon succeeding to any primacy.  The Norman imposed his laws upon England; the courts, the parish-registers, the Acts of Parliament were all his; but to this day there are districts of the Saxon Island where the postman and census-taker inquire in vain for Adam Smith and Benjamin Brown, but must perforce seek out Bullhead and Bandyshins.  So indomitable is the Saxon.