However, it is of little use to complain of a 'stream of tendency' which cannot be diverted from its course. The most distinguished people have had to tolerate the liberties taken with their names. Even the first of men has had to suffer, Hood having long ago said what a pity it was that, when Eve offered him the apple, poor Adam was not adam-ant. And when one turns to the celebrities of one's own country, one finds that many of them have had to endure attentions of the kind. There was, for example, that distinguished Marquis of whom it was said on one occasion that 'The nation's asleep, and the minister Rockingham.' There was also that Mr. Ward, afterwards Lord Dudley, of whom Byron declared that he would return to the Whigs if they would re-Ward him. How hard, again, was _Punch_ upon Sir Francis Head, for his well-known apologia for Louis Napoleon:
'He wrote to the _Times_ In defence of the crimes Disgraceful to the heart and to the Head, Head, Head.'
Hood pretended that, when he heard 'Those Evening Bells,' they did but remind him of the statesman who had invented and established the income-tax:
'Recalling only how a Peel Has taxed the comings-in of Time!'
That Mr. Disraeli's popular diminutive should suggest punning was inevitable, and so we find Shirley Brooks proposing, in 1865, that,
'Having finished his Iliad and ceased to be busy, Lord Derby should try and translate his Odd-Dizzy.'
The annals of the Church are no more free from jingles on names than those of any other institution. Familiar to many is the laconic epitaph on Archbishop Potter:
'Alack and well-a-day: Potter himself is turned to clay!'
Horace Walpole wrote bitterly of Thomas Secker, Archbishop of Canterbury, that 'His grace signed his own proper name--Thomas _Cant._,' which would certainly have read better as 'Thomas Cantuar.' But the bishops' signatures have always been regarded as fair game. What puns have been made on the unhappy, because so obvious, 'Oxon!' In 1848, when Bishop Hampden was accused of heresy by the party headed by the Bishop of Oxford, the would-be satirist wrote that
'As once the Pope with fury full, When Luther laid his heavy knocks on, At the Reformer loosed a Bull-- So these at Hampden set an Ox-on.'