d pigeons;
and if you once find yourselves in this strange place you will give them
but little thought. For under our feet is a great stone sea--vast
circular pits and troughs of solid stone--a very maelstrom of rock. Each
of those great wells narrowing towards the bottom represents one of the
gigantic pendants below. And here one's wonder is I think increased
sevenfold, and we ask how was it possible to poise this prodigious
weight on those slender walls. If we want an answer to our question we
must look outside the chapel, and observe the graceful Flying
Buttresses, which hold roof and walls together, springing from the
upper part of the windows, and ending in tall turrets which run down
and bury themselves in the ground. The buttresses are so light, and so
richly carved, and the turrets look so completely ornamental, with their
crockets, and the delicate canopies over the niches--empty alas! and
their string-course formed of the Tudor arms, that one thinks of them
merely as a lovely part of a lovely whole. So they are. But they are one
of the chief means of binding that splendid roof together--of keeping
the walls from being pulled inward by the mass of stone they have to
support. They act like the guy-ropes which keep a flagstaff upright.

Thus far we have seen how by Edward the Sixth's time the mediaeval
architecture has given place to the Tudor, the feudal Gothic to the more
domestic Perpendicular. But in the constitution of the Abbey a far more
momentous change had taken place. In Henry the Eighth's reign the
Reformation shook the life of England to its very foundation. It is not
my intention to enter upon that vast and deeply important subject. I
only wish to show you some of its effects on Westminster Abbey. The
Abbey and Monastery of Westminster shared in the general Dissolution of
Monasteries in 1539. The last Abbot of Westminster was converted into a
Dean, and "the Monks were succeeded by twelve Prebendaries, each to be
present daily in the Choir, and to preach once a quarter."[43] The
"Abbot's Place" was to be known henceforth as the "Deanery." And for us,
who have known that Deanery in the brilliant days of Arthur Penrhyn
Stanley, what memories does the name awake. But more. All the relics in
the Abbey that had been given, as we have seen, by successive kings, and
with them Llewellyn's golden crown, and the banners and statues around
the shrine of St. Edward, all these were swept away as worthless or
worse