Lines written on a Window-Pane at the Old Bush Hotel
David Hume
Here chicks in eggs for breakfast sprawl;
Here godless boys God's glories squall;
Here heads of Scotchmen guard the wall;
But Corbie walks alone for all.
David Hume stopped off in Carlisle while travelling from Paris back home to Edinburgh. He was so displeased with his breakfast in the Bush Hotel, and his experience of Carlisle in general, that he scratched this poem on the window pane. The pane remained there until 1848 when it was secured by a local lawyer who gave it to the prominent Howard family for safekeeping.
