He takes his ring again and writes another line thus: Virtue alone is an estate. I borrowed it again, and I wrote under it: But money's virtue, gold is fate.[1] After a number of additional thrusts and counterthrusts of this sort, Moll and her lover come to terms and are married. [Footnote 1: Daniel Defoe, _Moll Flanders_ (New York: New American Library, 1964), pp. 71-72.] The latter half of the twentieth century has seen a steady growth of serious scholarly interest in graffiti. Sociologists, psychologists, and historians have increasingly turned to the impromptu "scratchings" of both the educated and the uneducated as indicators of the general mental health and political stability of specific populations.[2] Although most of us are familiar with at least a few of these studies and all of us have observed numerous examples of this species of writing on the walls of our cities and the rocks of our national parks, we are not likely, before encountering this scene in _Moll Flanders_, to have ever before come into contact with graffiti produced with such an elegant writing implement. [Footnote 2: For example, E. A. Humphrey Fenn, "The Writing on the Wall," _History Today_, 19 (1969), 419-423, and "Graffiti," _Contemporary Review_, 215 (1969), 156-160; Terrance L. Stocker, Linda W. Dutcher, Stephen M. Hargrove, and Edwin A. Cook, "Social Analysis of Graffiti," _Journal of American Folklore_, 85 (1972), 356-366; Sylvia Spann, "The Handwriting on the Wall," _English Journal_, 62 (1973), 1163-1165; Robert Reisner and Lorraine Wechsler, _Encyclopedia of Graffiti_ (New York: Macmillan, 1974); "Graffiti Helps Mental Patients," _Science Digest_, April, 1974, pp. 47-48; Henry Solomon and Howard Yager, "Authoritarianism and Graffiti," _Journal of Social Psychology_, 97 (1975), 149-150; Carl A. Bonuso, "Graffiti," _Today's Education_, 65 (1976), 90-91; Elizabeth Wales and Barbara Brewer, "Graffiti in the 1970's," _Journal of Social Psychology_, 99 (1976), 115-123; Ernest L. Abel and Barbara E. Buckley, _The Handwriting on the Wall: Toward a Sociology and Psychology of Graffiti_ (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977); and Marina N. Haan and Richard B. Hammerstrom, _Graffiti in the Ivy League_ (New York: Warner Books, 1981).] Glass being fragile and diamonds being relatively rare, it is not surprising that few examples of graffiti produced by the method employed by Moll and her lover are known to us today. Interestingly enough, we do, however, have available to us a variety of Renaissance and eighteenth-century written materials suggesting that the practice of using a diamond to write ephemeral statements on window glass was far less rare in those periods than we might expect. Holinshed, for example, tells us that in 1558 when Elizabeth was released from imprisonment at Woodstock, she taunted her enemies by writing