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.
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.
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
these verses with hir diamond in a glasse window verie legiblie as here followeth:
Much suspected by me,
Nothing prooued can be:
Quoth Elizabeth prisoner.[3]
And in John Donne's "A Valediction: of my Name in the Window," we find two lovers in a situation reminiscent of that of the scene I previously quoted from Moll Flanders. Using a diamond, the poet, before beginning an extended journey, scratches his name on a window pane in the house of his mistress. Here is the first stanza of the poem:
My name engrav'd herein,
Doth contribute my firmnesse to this glasse,