The guests at inns in the middle of the eighteenth century often did not, it seems, disdain the walls; for in _Columella_, a curious novel of travelling, published about that period, we read that the characters in it found time on their journey “to examine the inscriptions on walls and windows, and learned that the love of woman, the love of wine, and the love of fame were the three ruling passions that usually vented themselves” in this manner. These were travellers who, come what might, determined to be unconventional. “When they came to an inn, instead of complaining of their accommodations, or bullying the waiters, they diverted themselves with the humours of my landlord, criticising his taste in his furniture or his pictures, or in perusing the inscriptions on the walls or windows, or inquiring into the history of the neighbouring gentry. In short, they had determined to be pleased with everything, and therefore were not disappointed.” At the inn where these original persons breakfasted the great patriot, John Wilkes, had usurped the principal place over the parlour chimney. Where they stopped to dine, the virtuous George the Third and the amiable Charlotte had resumed their places in the dining-room, and “Wilkes was only stuck up against the stable-door, and in the temple of Cloacina.” Alas! poor Wilkes, to be subjected to such an indignity! At one inn they found the inscription: James Harding, from Birmingham, dined here, Sept. 29, 1763. Button-maker by trade, and there is your bid for fame. The other remarks they shamelessly quote are all very well for eighteenth-century books, but they are not permitted on the printed page in our own time. There was once a poet of a minor sort who not only cherished a mania for scribbling verse on the windows of inns, but was mad enough to collect and print a series of these by no means distinguished efforts, which he published under the title of _Verses written on Windows in several parts of the Kingdom in a Journey to Scotland_. This extraordinary person was one Aaron Hill, who “flourished” (as an historian might say) between 1685 and 1750. If he is at all remembered to-day, it is only as a friend of Pope, whose truest criticism presents him as “one of the flying fishes, only capable of making brief flights out of the profound.” He afterwards, with more friendship and less truth, described Hill as attempting to dive into dulness, but rising unstained to “mount far off among the swans of Thames.” How pretty! but he was in truth the veriest goose, and his pinions ineffectual.