Excerpt from Personal and Family Names: A Popular Monograph on the Origin and History of the Nomenclature of the Present and Former Times
About the year 1856 my attention was specially directed to the study of personal names, and circumstances at that time led me to concentrate attention upon this field of literature. Having laboured therein for the period of about fourteen years, the result was produced in a work entitled "The Names We Bear." So little did I expect my book to take the market that it was brought out privately. Howbeit, the edition of two thousand copies was not long in the hands of readers when a succession of complimentary critiques and encouraging notices began to flow in from both sides of the Atlantic. Frequent applications for the work from far and near induced me to put forth extra exertions to produce a work yet more worthy of the subject and of our times. After thirteen years additional labour thereat, I venture to come before the public again as an author and to ask the patronage of the general community. This may be regarded as an entirely new work, being rewritten throughout, and in extent exceeding the previous volume by about one-half.
Much study is but an effort to make the past present. What else does the Historian, whether in ordinary prose or in epic poem? the Geologist, when unfolding the stony pages of primary deposits? the Dramatist, if presenting the lives and actions of the heroic dead, than revivify past ages, or rather, re-present the illustrious departed, whose memory man treasures? Educated men cannot rest while the past remains unveiled. My book is a tiny effort to reproduce the great actors of past generations in greater numbers than history can take cognisance of. Much of this work refers to periods when as yet the history of nations, passed under review, was unwritten.
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