sixpence." A guide-book of 1783 says of this
effigy: "Introduced at a considerable expense.
. . . The eagerness of connoisseurs and artists
to see this figure, and the satisfaction it affords,
justly place it among the first of the kind ever
seen in this or any other country." We are at
least spared the degradation of such puffs as
this by the regulations now in force, and we
begin to feel a new confidence in the existing
management of the Abbey.

A book of elegant extracts might easily be
compiled from celebrated authors who have
written on this grand old edifice, and who
are quoted by the dean. Washington Irving
sketches for us "the grey walls discoloured by
damp, and crumbling with age," and shows
with his usual felicity how "a coat of hoary
moss has gathered over the inscriptions of
several of the monuments, and obscured the
death's heads and other funeral emblems."
Raleigh slept in the gate-house of the old
monastery the night before his execution; and
Lovelace's famous lines:

        Stone walls do not a prison make
        Nor iron bars a cage,

were penned during his incarceration in the
same chamber. Howell's Perlustration of
London, published in 1657, says "The Abbey
of Westminster hath been always held the
greatest sanctuary and randevouze of devotion
of the whole island: whereunto the situation
of the very place seems to contribute much,
and to strike a holy kind of reverence and
sweetness of melting piety into the hearts of
beholders." Waller says:

The antique pyle behold,
Where royal heads receive the sacred gold;
It gives them crowns, and does their ashes keep.
There made like gods, like mortals there they sleep.

Jeremy Taylor preached to the same effect,
and Francis Beaumont had previously called
upon his readers to

        Think how many royal bones
        Sleep within these heaps of stones.

Steele in his account of Betterton's funeral, and
Lamb in his protest against the affected attitude
and theatrical graces of the monument to Garrick,
both moralise on the solemnities of the Abbey;
and Addison's noble reflections there, are among
the finest in the language. "When I am in a
serious humour," wrote Mr. Spectator, "I very
often walk by myself in Westminster Abbey;
when the gloominess of the place, and the use
to which it is applied, with the solemnity of the
building, and the condition of the people who
lie in it, are apt to fill the mind with a kind of
melancholy, or rather thoughtfulness, which is
not disagreeable. . . . When I look upon the
tomb of the great, every emotion of envy dies
within me; when I read the epitaphs of the
beautiful every inordinate desire goes out;
when I meet with the grief of parents upon a
tombstone, my heart melts with compassion;
when I see the tomb of the parents themselves
I consider the vanity of grieving for those we
must so quickly follow; when I see kings lying
by those who deposed them; when I consider
rival wits placed side by side, or the holy men
that divided the world with their contests and
disputes, I reflect with sorrow and astonishment
on the little competitions, factions, and
debates of mankind. When I read the several
dates of the tombs of some who died yesterday,
and some six hundred years ago, I consider
that great day when we shall all of us be
contemporaries, and make our appearance
together." Tickell in his "Lines on the Death
of Addison," speaks of the luxury of ranging
the gloomy aisles alone, and of the

Just men, by whom impartial laws were given;
And saints who taught, and led, the way to heaven,

whose names are sculptured near; and quotations
might be multiplied indefinitely from the
great English authors who have made
Westminster their theme.

The coronation chair, with the stone of Scone,
called "Jacob's Pillow," inclosed in it, which,
it will be remembered, Sir Roger de Coverley
tried, and in which Goldsmith "could see no
curiosity," is shown us in due course by our
guide, to the manifest interest of all. Visitors
are kept off by a railing now, but we peer at it
gravely, as if to read some mystic words in the
plebeian cutting and scratching with which it is
defaced. We hear how it has only once been
moved out of the Abbey (when Cromwell was
installed Lord Protector in Westminster Hall)
since it was conquered from the Scots by
Edward the First; now all the kings and queens
of England have been crowned in it since; and
how the chair by its side was made in imitation
for the double coronation of William and Mary.
No detail is too slight or trivial for our party;
and the women with the babies linger by the
ugly old relic as if fascinated, long after our
urbane guide has moved away. It is worth
remembering here that, as Dean Stanley
reminds us, no other coronation rite in Europe
reaches back to so early a period as that of
the sovereigns of Britain. Tradition assigns
Stonehenge as the spot where the half-fabulous
Arthur was crowned. The coronation of the
seven Saxon kings from Edward the Elder to
Ethelred took place at the first ford in the
Thames; Hardicanute's at Oxford; Canute's
at St. Paul's; but the great crowning place of
the Saxons became the sanctuary of the house
of Cerdic, the cathedral of Winchester. Harold's
coronation took place on the same day as the
Confessor's funeral, when all was in such haste
and confusion that it is doubtful whether the
ceremony took place at Westminster or St.
Paul's. But from the crowning of William the
Norman, by the grave of his predecessor King
Edward, whom he claimed to succeed not so
much by victory as by right, our coronations
have taken place in the Abbey. The religious
ceremony, which was regarded as conferring
some sacramental virtue, was as nearly as possible
concurrent with the monarch's accession; and
with the exception of Edward the First, in whose