Anonymous (A Seven Years Absentee)

A Sabbath in London

in The New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal. London, July to December, 1822. Republished by Oliver Everett, Boston, 1822.

I avoided the way to the lounging places, and strolled thoughtfully on to the Regent’s park, near which I lost myself in a wilderness of cottages and villas that had sprung up like magic since my last visit to London. One little piece of classic curiosity here struck particularly my attention. It was a brass plate on a door, with the inscription Digamma Cottage which was chosen I suppose to puzzle the vulgar; while the [digamma symbol] placed above it, though comprehensible to the learned, serves only to announce to the common eye, through its resemblance to one of the characters of our alphabet [F], the name of the celebrated owner. This information I obtained from a butcher’s boy who was passing, and who assured me that "the F stood for Foscolo, the great Italian poet, and that Digamma was the Latin for Die Game;" which proved what all the world said, that he was a true patriot into the bargain!

The digamma was the sixth letter of the original Greek Alphabet (unfortunately I cannot reproduce it here); the cottage was named after an erudite article that the poet had written on that subject. See the Foscolo entry for a description of life at the cottage, its extravagance and its nemesis.