WESTMINSTER ABBEY
It is strange that the life of the past, in its unfamiliar remains and
fading traces, should so far surpass the life of the present, in
impressive force and influence. Human characteristics, although
manifested under widely different conditions, were the same in old times
that they are now. It is not in them, surely, that we are to seek for
the mysterious charm that hallows ancient objects and the historical
antiquities of the world. There is many a venerable, weather-stained
church in London, at sight of which your steps falter and your thoughts
take a wistful, melancholy turn--though then you may not know either who
built it, or who has worshipped in it, or what dust of the dead is
mouldering in its vaults. The spirit which thus instantly possesses and
controls you is not one of association, but is inherent in the place.
Time's shadow on the works of man, like moonlight on a landscape, gives
only graces to the view--tingeing them, the while, with sombre
sheen--and leaves all blemishes in darkness. This may suggest the reason
that relics of bygone years so sadly please and strangely awe us, in the
passing moment; or it may be that we involuntarily contrast their
apparent permanence with our own evanescent mortality, and so are
dejected with a sentiment of dazed helplessness and solemn grief. This
sentiment it is--allied to bereaved love and a natural wish for
remembrance after death--that has filled Westminster Abbey, and many
another holy mausoleum, with sculptured memorials of the departed; and
this, perhaps, is the subtle power that makes us linger beside them,
"with thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls."
Illustration: "Westminster Abbey, from the Triforium."
When the gentle angler Izaak Walton went into Westminster Abbey to visit
the grave of Casaubon, he scratched his initials on the scholar's
monument, where the record, "I. W., 1658," may still be read by the
stroller in Poets' Corner. One might well wish to follow that example,
and even thus to associate his name with the great cathedral. And not in
pride but in humble reverence! Here if anywhere on earth self-assertion
is rebuked and human eminence set at nought. Among all the impressions
that crowd upon the mind in this wonderful place that which oftenest
recurs and longest remains is the impression of man's individual
insignificance. This is salutary, but it is also dark. There can be no
enjoyment of the Abbey till, after much communion with the spirit of the
place, your soul is soothed by its beauty rather than overwhelmed by its
majesty, and your mind ceases from the vain effort to grasp and
interpret its tremendous meaning. You cannot long endure, and you never
can express, the sense of grandeur that is inspired by Westminster
Abbey; but, when at length its shrines and tombs and statues become
familiar, when its chapels, aisles, arches, and cloisters are grown
companionable, and you can stroll and dream undismayed "through rows of
warriors and through walks of kings," there is no limit to the pensive
memories they awaken and the poetic fancies they prompt.
Illustration: "Henry VII. Chapel."
In this church are buried, among generations of their nobles and
courtiers, fourteen monarchs of England--beginning with the Saxon Sebert
and ending with George the Second. Fourteen queens rest here, and many
children of the royal blood who never came to the throne. Here,
confronted in a haughty rivalry of solemn pomp, rise the equal tombs of
Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart. Queen Eleanor's dust is here, and here,
too, is the dust of the grim Queen Mary. In one little chapel you may
pace, with but half a dozen steps, across the graves of Charles the
Second, William and Mary, and Queen Anne and her consort Prince George.
At the tomb of Henry the Fifth you may see the helmet, shield, and
saddle that were worn by the valiant young king at Agincourt; and close
by--on the tomb of Margaret Woodeville, daughter of Edward the
Fourth--the sword and shield that were borne, in royal state, before the
great Edward the Third, five hundred years ago. The princes who are said
to have been murdered in the Tower are commemorated here by an altar,
set up by Charles the Second, whereon the inscription--blandly and
almost humorously oblivious of the incident of Cromwell--states that it
was erected in the thirtieth year of Charles's reign. Richard the
Second, deposed and assassinated, is here entombed; and within a few
feet of him are the relics of his uncle, the able and powerful Duke of
Gloster, treacherously ensnared and betrayed to death. Here also, huge,
rough, and gray, is the stone sarcophagus of Edward the First, which,
when opened, in 1771, disclosed the skeleton of departed majesty, still
perfect, wearing robes of gold tissue and crimson velvet, and having a
crown on the head and a sceptre in the hand. So sleep, in jewelled
darkness and gaudy decay, what once were monarchs! And all around are
great lords, holy prelates, famous statesmen, renowned soldiers, and
illustrious poets. Burleigh, Pitt, Fox, Burke, Canning, Newton, Barrow,
Wilberforce--names forever glorious!--are here enshrined in the grandest
sepulchre on earth.
The interments that have been effected in and around the Abbey since the
remote age of Edward the Confessor must number thousands; but only about
six hundred are named in the guide-books. In the south transept, which
is Poets' Corner, rest Chaucer, Spenser, Drayton, Cowley, Dryden,
Beaumont, Davenant, Prior, Gay, Congreve, Rowe, Dr. Johnson, Campbell,
Macaulay, and Dickens. Memorials to many other poets and writers have
been ranged on the adjacent walls and pillars; but these are among the
authors that were actually buried in this place. Ben Jonson is not here,
but--in an upright posture, it is said--under the north aisle of the
Abbey; Addison is in the chapel of Henry the Seventh, at the foot of the
monument of Charles Montague, the great Earl of Halifax; and Bulwer is
in the chapel of St. Edmund. Garrick, Sheridan, Henderson, Cumberland,
Handel, Parr, Sir Archibald Campbell, and the once so mighty Duke of
Argyle are almost side by side; while in St. Edward's chapel sleep Anne
of Cleves, the divorced wife of Henry the Eighth, and Anne Neville,
queen of Richard the Third.
Illustration: "Chapel of Edward the Confessor."
Betterton and Spranger Barry are in the cloisters--where may be read, in
four little words, the most touching epitaph in the Abbey: "Jane
Lister--dear child." There are no monuments to either Byron, Shelley,
Swift, Pope, Bolingbroke, Keats, Cowper, Moore, or Young; but Mason and
Shadwell are commemorated; and Barton Booth is splendidly inurned; while
hard by, in the cloisters, a place was found for Mrs. Cibber, Tom Brown,
Anne Bracegirdle, Anne Oldfield, and Aphra Behn. The destinies have not
always been stringently fastidious as to the admission of lodgers to
this sacred ground. The pilgrim is startled by some of the names that he
finds in Westminster Abbey, and pained by reflection on the absence of
some that he will seek in vain. Yet he will not fail to moralise, as he
strolls in Poets' Corner, upon the inexorable justice with which time
repudiates fictitious reputations and twines the laurel on only the
worthiest brows. In well-nigh five hundred years of English literature
there have lived only about a hundred and ten poets whose names survive
in any needed chronicle; and not all of those possess life outside of
the library. To muse over the literary memorials in the Abbey is also to
think upon the seeming caprice of chance with which the graves of the
British poets have been scattered far and wide throughout the land.
Illustration: "The Poets' Corner."
Gower, Fletcher, and Massinger (to name but a few of them) rest in
Southwark; Sydney and Donne in St. Paul's cathedral; More (his head,
that is, while his body moulders in the Tower chapel) at Canterbury;
Drummond in Lasswade church; Dorset at Withyham, in Sussex; Waller at
Beaconsfield; Wither, unmarked, in the church of the Savoy; Milton in
the church of the Cripplegate--where his relics, it is said, were
despoiled; Swift at Dublin, in St. Patrick's cathedral; Young at
Welwyn; Pope at Twickenham; Thomson at Richmond; Gray at Stoke-Pogis;
Watts in Bunhill-Fields; Collins in an obscure little church at
Chichester--though his name is commemorated by a tablet in Chichester
cathedral; Cowper in Dereham church; Goldsmith in the garden of the
Temple; Savage at Bristol; Burns at Dumfries; Rogers at Hornsey; Crabbe
at Trowbridge; Scott in Dryburgh abbey; Coleridge at Highgate; Byron in
Hucknall church, near Nottingham; Moore at Bromham; Montgomery at
Sheffield; Heber at Calcutta; Southey in Crossthwaite churchyard, near
Keswick; Wordsworth and Hartley Coleridge side by side in the churchyard
of Grasmere; and Clough at Florence--whose lovely words may here speak
for all of them--
"One port, methought, alike they sought,
One purpose held, where'er they fare:
O bounding breeze, O rushing seas.
At last, at last, unite them there!"
But it is not alone in the great Abbey that the rambler in London is
impressed by poetic antiquity and touching historic association--always
presuming that he has been a reader of English literature and that his
reading has sunk into his mind. Little things, equally with great ones,
commingled in a medley, luxuriant and delicious, so people the memory of
such a pilgrim that all his walks will be haunted. The London of to-day,
to be sure (as may be seen in Macaulay's famous third chapter, and in
Scott's _Fortunes of Nigel), _is very little like even the London of
Charles the Second, when the great fire had destroyed eighty-nine
churches and thirteen thousand houses, and when what is now Regent
Street was a rural solitude in which sportsmen sometimes shot the
woodcock.
Illustration: "The North Ambulatory."
Yet, though much of the old capital has vanished and more of it has been
changed, many remnants of its historic past exist, and many of its
streets and houses are fraught with a delightful, romantic interest. It
is not forgotten that sometimes the charm resides in the eyes that see,
quite as much as in the object that is seen. The storied spots of London
may not be appreciable by all who look upon them every day. The
cab-drivers in the region of Kensington Palace Road may neither regard,
nor even notice, the house in which Thackeray lived and died. The
shop-keepers of old Bond Street may, perhaps, neither care nor know that
in this famous avenue was enacted the woeful death-scene of Laurence
Sterne. The Bow Street runners are quite unlikely to think of Will's
Coffee House, and Dryden, or Button's, and Addison, as they pass the
sites of those vanished haunts of wit and revelry in the days of Queen
Anne. The fashionable lounger through Berkeley Square, when perchance he
pauses at the corner of Bruton Street, will not discern Colley Cibber,
in wig and ruffles, standing at the parlour window and drumming with his
hands on the frame. The casual passenger, halting at the Tavistock, will
not remember that this was once Macklin's Ordinary, and so conjure up
the iron visage and ferocious aspect of the first great Shylock of the
British stage, formally obsequious to his guests, or striving to edify
them, despite the banter of the volatile Foote, with discourse upon "the
Causes of Duelling in Ireland." The Barbican does not to every one
summon the austere memory of Milton; nor Holborn raise the melancholy
shade of Chatterton; nor Tower Hill arouse the gloomy ghost of Otway;
nor Hampstead lure forth the sunny figure of Steele and the passionate
face of Keats; nor old Northumberland Street suggest the burly presence
of "rare Ben Jonson"; nor opulent Kensington revive the stately head of
Addison; nor a certain window in Wellington Street reveal in fancy's
picture the rugged lineaments and splendid eyes of Dickens.
Illustration: "The Spaniards, Hampstead."
Yet London never disappoints; and for him who knows and feels its
history these associations, and hundreds like to these, make it populous
with noble or strange or pathetic figures, and diversify the aspect of
its vital present with pictures of an equally vital past. Such a
wanderer discovers that in this vast capital there is literally no end
to the themes that are to stir his imagination, touch his heart, and
broaden his mind. Soothed already by the equable English climate and the
lovely English scenery, he is aware now of an influence in the solid
English city that turns his intellectual life to perfect tranquillity.
He stands amid achievements that are finished, careers that are
consummated, great deeds that are done, great memories that are
immortal; he views and comprehends the sum of all that is possible to
human thought, passion, and labour; and then,--high over mighty London,
above the dome of St. Paul's cathedral, piercing the clouds, greeting
the sun, drawing into itself all the tremendous life of the great city
and all the meaning of its past and present,--the golden cross of
Christ!
Illustration: "Dome of St. Paul's"