The inappropriateness of the name was not lost on the poet Robert Southey, in his satirical "Letters from England" written in the character of a Spanish aristocrat. It commented: "The very shopboards must be... painted in Egyptian letters, which, as the Egyptians had no letters, you will doubtless conceive must be curious. They are simply the common characters, deprived of all beauty and all proportion by having all the strokes of equal thickness, so that those which should be thin look as if they had the elephantiasis." Similarly, the painter Joseph Farington wrote in his diary on September 13, 1805 of seeing the memorial to Isaac Hawkins Browne in the chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge, engraved "in what is called "Egyptian Characters" which to my eye had a disagreeable effect."