the same thought should recur, It is long since I saw and read these inscriptions; but I remember the impression was of a smug usher at his desk in the intervals of instruction, levelling his pen. Of death, as it consists of dust and worms, and mourners and uncertainty, he had never thought; but the word "death" he had often seen separate and conjunct with other words, till he had learned to speak of all its attributes as glibly as Unitarian Belsham will discuss you the attributes of the word "God" in a pulpit, and will talk of infinity with a tongue that dangles from a skull that never reached in thought and thorough imagination two inches, or farther than from his hand to his mouth, or from the vestry to the sounding-board of the pulpit. But the epitaphs were trim and sprag, and patent, and pleased the survivors of Thames Ditton above the old mumpsimus of Afflictions sore. Literature – fiction and verse In 1834, well after the lock below was built, Theodore Hook composed an ode or tribute, fishing from a punt here: Here, in a placid waking dream I'm free from worldly troubles, Calm as the rippling silver stream That in the sunshine baubles; And when sweet Eden's blissful bowers Some abler bard has writ on, Despairing to transcend his powers, I'll ditto say for Ditton He also wrote verse about The Swan Inn that year. Eric Wilson Barker (1905–1973), poet, spent his childhood in the village, attended the old church school in Church Walk, then his family emigrated to California for health reasons. Barker became a celebrate and was offered the laureateship of California, which he declined. He revisited his birthplace in 1959 and wrote to a friend: 'I visited an ancient pub, The Old Harrow near Weston Green. I always remember the lines on the signboard of that inn when I was a kid.... There it was too and the old weatherworn sign with the letters a bit dim but still legible!' Barker wrote a poem "IN THAMES DITTON" under Looking for Water, published 1964: "In Thames Ditton I remembered a clock....." Ernest William Hornung penned a very brief local stay of the narrator-protagonist in The Amateur Cracksman (1899): Literature – biographic main references Thomas Babington Macaulay rented lodgings a year near Esher railway station (then still "Ditton Marsh") while writing some of his History