. Architects cannot teach nature anything. Let me remove this
matting--it is put here to preserve the pavement; now there is a bit
of pavement that is seven hundred years old; you can see by these
scattering clusters of colored mosaics how beautiful it was before
time and sacrilegious idlers marred it. Now there, in the border,
was an inscription, once see, follow the circle-you can trace it by
the ornaments that have been pulled out--here is an A and there is
an O, and yonder another A--all beautiful Old English capitals;
there is no telling what the inscription was--no record left now.
Now move along in this direction, if you please. Yonder is where
old King Sebert the Saxon lies his monument is the oldest one in the
Abbey; Sebert died in 616,--[Clemens probably misunderstood the
name. It was Ethelbert who died in 616. The name Sebert does not
appear in any Saxon annals accessible to the author.]--and that's
as much, as twelve hundred and fifty years ago think of it! Twelve
hundred and fifty years! Now yonder is the last one--Charles
Dickens--there on the floor, with the brass letters on the slab--and
to this day the people come and put flowers on it.... There is
Garrick's monument; and Addison's, and Thackeray's bust--and
Macaulay lies there. And close to Dickens and Garrick lie Sheridan
and Dr. Johnson--and here is old Parr....

"That stone there covers Campbell the poet. Here are names you know
pretty well--Milton, and Gray who wrote the Elegy, and Butler who
wrote Hudibras; and Edmund Spenser, and Ben Jonson--there are three
tablets to him scattered about the Abbey, and all got 'O, Rare Ben
Jonson' cut on them. You were standing on one of them just now he
is buried standing up. There used to be a tradition here that
explains it. The story goes that he did not dare ask to be buried
in the Abbey, so he asked King James if he would make him a present
of eighteen inches of English ground, and the King said 'yes,' and
asked him where he would have it, and he said in Westminster Abbey.
Well, the King wouldn't go back on his word, and so there he is,
sure enough-stood up on end."

The reader may regret that there are not more of these entries, and that
the book itself was never written. Just when he gave up the project is
not recorded. He was urged to lecture in London, but declined. To Mrs.
Cl