Works Author:James Fenimore Cooper Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE CRATER. CHAPTER I. " 'Twas u commodity lay fretting by you; 'Twill brinj? you gain, or perish on the sens." Tamixo Of TtiK Shkfw. There is nothi... more »ng in which American liberty, not always as much restrained as it might be, has manifested a more deckled tendency to run riot, than in the use of names. As for Christian names, the heathen mythology, the Bible, ancient history, and all the classics, have long since been exhausted, and the organ of invention nas been at work, with an exuberance of imagination that is really wonderful for such a matter-of-fact people. Whence all the strange sounds have been derived which have thus been pressed into the service of this human nomenclature, it would puzzle the most ingenious philologist to say. The days of the Kates, and Dollys, and Pattys, and Bettys, have passed away, and in their stead we hear of Lov- inys, and Orchistrys, Philenys, Alminys, Cytherys, Sarahlettys, Amindys, Marindys, etc., etc., etc. AH these last appellations terminate properly with an a, but this unfortunate vowel, when a final letter, being popularly pronounced like y, we have adapted our spelling to the sound, which produces a complete bathos to all these flights in taste. The hero of this narrative was born fully sixty years since, and happily before the rage for modern appellations, though hejust escaped being named after another system which we cannot say we altogether admire: that of using a family, for a Christian mime. This business of names is a sort of science in itself, and we do believe that it is less understood and less attended to in this country than in almost all others. When a Spaniard writes his name as Juan de Castro y Muiios, we know that his father belonged to the family of Castro, and his mother to that of Munos. The French, and I...« less