Surname Origins, Their Source and Significations (1875)

Looking back, however, upon these earlier names, how many varied and conflicting qualities of the human heart do they all reflect, some honourable, some harmlessly innocent, the greater part, I fear, discreditable. Of all how much might be said, but I refrain, lest I be liable to a charge of acting contrary to the spirit of the kindly old adage, 'de mortuis nil nisi bonum' — 'speak no evil of the dead.' Thus tell-tale, however, are our surnames, and if it be no pleasant task to expose the weaknesses and the frailties of them whose bones have so long ere this crumbled into decay, still we may comfort ourselves with the remembrance that their names, with many others I could have adduced had space permitted, offer no kind of reflection upon their present possessors. It is not unseldom we see the bearer of a worthy name dragging the same through the dust and mire of an ignoble life. It is amongst these names of somewhat unsavoury origin we oftentimes meet with the best, and the truest, and the noblest of our fellows.