The Purloined Plaques

The impulse to deface public monuments is older than Kilroy. Lately, however, some Americans seem to be seized by a new urge to take a piece of history home with them. In Boston, about 20 plaques have disappeared from some of the nation's oldest historical landmarks--among them Benjamin Franklin's birthplace on Milk Street.

In Baltimore, there was even more melancholy vandalism. Upon a recent midnight dreary, someone entered the Westminster Presbyterian Church graveyard and pried an 18-in. circular bronze medallion sculpture of Edgar Allan Poe's head from the shaft marking his grave. Stephane Mallarme was being too optimistic when he wrote The Tomb of Edgar Poe: "Let this granite at least forever be a boundary/To the foul flights of scattered blasphemy in the future."

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