m, which means "I
love") calls himself Mr. Love! Another brother remains a Brehony, thus
showing his descent from one of the very highest and most honourable
titles in Ireland--a Brehon, law-giver and poet; the other brother is John
Judge. In fact, hundreds of thousands of Irishmen prefer to drop their
honourable Milesian names, and call themselves Groggins or Duggan, or
Higgins or Guthry, or any other beastly name, in preference to the
surnames of warriors, saints, and poets; and the melancholy part of it is,
that not one single word of warning or remonstrance has been raised, as
far as I am aware, against this colossal cringing either by the Irish
public press or public men.

With our Irish Christian names the case is nearly as bad. Where are now
all the fine old Irish Christian names of both men and women which were in
vogue even a hundred years ago? They have been discarded as unclean
things, not because they were ugly in themselves or inharmonious, but
simply because they were not English. No man is now christened by a Gaelic
name, "nor no woman neither." Such common Irish Christian names as Conn,
Cairbre, Farfeasa, Teig, Diarmuid, Kian, Cuan, Ae, Art, Mahon, Eochaidh,
Fearflatha, Cathan, Rory, Coll, Lochlainn, Cathal, Lughaidh, Turlough,
Eamon, Randal, Niall, Sorley, and Conor, are now extinct or nearly so.
Donough and Murrough survive in the O'Brien family. Angus, Manus, Fergal,
and Felim are now hardly known. The man whom you call Diarmuid when you
speak Irish, a low, pernicious, un-Irish, detestable custom, begot by
slavery, propagated by cringing, and fostered by flunkeyism, forces you to
call Jeremiah when you speak English, or as a concession, Darby. In like
manner, the indigenous Teig is West-Britonised into Thaddeus or Thady, for
no earthly reason than that both begin with a T. Donough is Denis, Cahal
is Charles, Murtagh and Murough are Mortimer, Domhnall is Daniel,
Partholan, the name of the earliest coloniser of Ireland, is Bartholomew
or Batty,[21] Eoghan (Owen) is frequently Eugene, and our own O'Curry,
though he plucked up courage to prefix the O to his name in later life,
never discarded the Eugene, which, however, is far from being a
monstrosity like most of our West-Britonised names; Felim is Felix,
Finghin (Finneen) is Florence, Conor is Corney, Turlough is Terence,
Eamon is Edmond or Neddy, and so on. In fact, of the great wealth of
Gaelic Christian names in use a century or two ago, only Owen, Br