Chapter XCVI: Section VI: Crispus, &c

Crispus (curled, or wrinkled), the same word which has produced our crisp; and the French _crépé_ (applied to hair), became a cognomen, and in late times produced Crispinus and Crispinianus, two brothers who accompanied St. Quentin when he preached the Gospel in France. They settled at Soissons, and there, while pursuing their mission, supported themselves by making shoes until their martyrdom, A.D. 287. Shoemakers, of course, adopted them as their patrons, and theirs was a universal holiday.

“Oh! that we now had here
But one ten thousand of those men in England
Who do no work to-day.”

That day being the 25th of October, that of the battle of Agincourt, of which King Henry augurs—

“And Crispin, Crispian, shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered.”

Crispin has never been a frequent Christian name, but it has become a surname with us, and the French have Crêpin, Crêpet, and the Italians Crispino. _Crispin_ is still the French for a shoemaker’s last. Crêpin means a little stool which the Irish call a creepeen.

Drusus, a cognomen in the Livian gens, was only accounted for among the Romans by a story that its first owner took it from having killed a chieftain in Gaul named Drausus. This word is explained by comparative philologists as firm or rigid in Keltic, _Drud_, strong, in Welsh, _droth_ in Erse. Either the Gaul was the real cause of the surname, or it is an instance of the Keltic element in old Italian. It is hardly worthy of notice, except that, in imitation of the sister and daughter of his patron Caligula, Herod Agrippa called his daughter by the feminine diminutive Drusilla, by which she appears by the side of Felix, hearing but little regarding the discourse of St. Paul.

The name of Felix himself was an agnomen frequently assumed by peculiarly fortunate individuals. It meant happy, and has given rise to all manner of words of good augury in the modern languages. No less than eleven saints so called are numbered in the Roman calendar, and yet it has never been a popular name, though sometimes occurring in Spain and France in the original form, and as Felice in Italy. The feminines, Felicia and Félise, in England and France, have been constructed from it, and Felicia was Queen of Navarre in 1067; but the abstract idea, Felicitas (happiness), once worshipped as a goddess at Rome, named the slave-martyr of Carthage, who suffered with St. Perpetua. There was another Felicitas who, with her seven sons, under Antoninus Pius, presented a Christian parallel to the mother in the Maccabees. Felicità in Italy, and Félicité in France, are the votaries of one or others of these. Felix is adopted in Ireland as a substitute for Feidlim or Phelim (ever good).

Faustus and Faustina are formed exactly in the same spirit of good augury, and Fausto is sometimes an Italian name.[65]

-----

Footnote 65:

Facciolati; Diefenbach; Smith; Butler; Anderson: _Irish Society_;
Grimm.