Perhaps, if they were
not so few, these images would not be so fascinating.

Yes, I am fascinated by them now. Terror has been toned to wonder. I am
filled with a kind of wondering pity. My academic theory about
wax-works has broken down utterly. These figures--kings, princes,
duchesses, queens--all are real to me now, and all are infinitely
pathetic, in the dignity of their fallen and forgotten greatness. With
what inalienable majesty they wear their rusty velvets and faded silks,
flaunting sere ruffles of point-lace, which at a touch now would be
shivered like cobwebs! My heart goes out to them through the glass that
divides us. I wish I could stay with them, bear them company, always. I
think they like me. I am afraid they will miss me. Perhaps it would be
better for us never to have met. Even Queen Elizabeth, beholding whom,
as she stands here, gaunt and imperious and appalling, I echo the words
spoken by Philip's envoy, 'This woman is possessed of a hundred
thousand devils'--even she herself, though she gazes askance into the
air, seems to be conscious of my presence, and to be willing me to
stay. It is a relief to meet the friendly bourgeois eye of good Queen
Anne. It has restored my common sense. 'These figures really are most
curious, most interesting...' and anon I am asking intelligent
questions about the contents of a big press, which, by special favour,
has been unlocked for me.

Perhaps the most romantic thing in the Islip Chapel is this press.
Herein, huddled one against another in dark recesses, lie the battered
and disjected remains of the earlier effigies--the primitive wooden
ones. Edward I. and Eleanor are known to be among them; and Henry VII.
and Elizabeth of York; and others not less illustrious. Which is which?
By size and shape you can distinguish the men from the women; but
beyond that is mere guesswork, be you never so expert. Time has broken
and shuffled these erst so significant effigies till they have become
as unmeaning for us as the bones in one of the old plague-pits. I feel
that I ought to be more deeply moved than I am by this sad state of
things. But I seem to have exhausted my capacity for sentiment; and I
cannot rise to the level of my opportunity. Would that I were
Thackeray! Dear gentleman, how promptly and copiously he would have
wept and moralised here, in his grandest manner, with that perfect
technical mastery which makes even now his tritest and shallowest
sermons sound rem