There are three Crosses at your door: Hang up your Wife, And you’l count Four. Swift, D., 1730. I have elsewhere,[8] and at considerable length, told the story of this remarkable incident, and given a _facsimile_ of the still-surviving inscription, so hesitate before reprinting it. In imagination one sees that gifted man riding horseback on his journeys between London and Holyhead, or Chester and Parkgate, on his way to or from Ireland, halting overnight with his attendant at the rough inns of that time, and leaving broadcast on the dim and flawed glass of their windows humorous or spiteful comments upon anything that chanced to arouse his criticism. You perceive him, waiting impatiently for breakfast, scrawling malignant lampoons with his ring, or recording the stupidities of his servant. The wayside taverns along that great north-westerly road should still have such evidence of his passing, only glass is brittle, and many a pane precious with those autographed records has accidentally perished, while doubtless many another has long ago been removed by admirers, and so become lost to the world. One such was the pane at the “Yacht” inn at Chester, that hoary timbered and plastered tavern whose nodding gables scarce uphold the story that this was once the foremost hotel of this picturesque city. The Dean, then at the height of his fame, halting here on his way into Ireland, was in one of his companionable humours, and invited the Dean and the other dignified clergy of the Cathedral to supper; but not one of them acknowledged his intended hospitality. Deans, Canons, and Prebendaries all agreed among themselves, or resolved separately, to ignore the distinguished visitor, who, in his rage, decorated a window with the couplet: Rotten without and mouldering within, This place and its clergy are all near akin. On the whole, regarding this quite dispassionately, having regard to the gross affront on the one hand and Swift’s malignant nature and very full sense of what was due to himself on the other, it can hardly be said that he rose to the heights of epigram or sank to the depths of abuse demanded by the occasion. Here he surely should have surpassed himself, in the one category or the other, or--even more characteristically--in both. We want more bitterness, more gall, an extra infusion of wormwood, and feel that this is an ineffectual thing that any affronted person, owning a diamond and merely capable of writing, could have achieved. And, even so, the historic pane itself has disappeared.