sepulchre of the kings, and surrounded them as with a guard of
honour after their death. We are sometimes inclined bitterly to contrast
the placid dignity of our recumbent kings, with Chatham gesticulating
from the northern transept, or Pitt from the western door, or Shakspeare
leaning on his column in Poet's Corner, or Wolfe expiring by the chapel
of St. John. But, in fact, they are, in their different ways, keeping
guard over the shrine of our monarchs and our laws; and their very
incongruity and variety become symbols of that harmonious diversity in
unity which pervades our whole commonwealth.'

Honoured by such a trust, we who serve God daily in the great Abbey are
not unmindful of the duty which lies on us to preserve and to restore, to
the best of our power, the general fabric; and to call on government and
on private persons to preserve and restore those monuments, for which
they, not we, are responsible. A stranger will not often enter our Abbey
without finding somewhere or other among its vast arcades, skilled
workmen busy over mosaic, marble, bronze, or 'storied window richly
dight;' and the very cloisters, which to Washington Irving's eye were
'discoloured with damp, crumbling with age, and crusted with a coat of
hoary moss,' are being repaired till that 'rich tracery of the arches,
and that leafy beauty of the roses which adorn the keystones'--of which
he tells--shall be as sharp and bright as they were first, 500 years ago.

One sentiment, again, which was called up in the mind of your charming
essayist, at the sight of Westminster Abbey, I have not felt myself: I
mean its sadness. 'What,' says he, 'is this vast assembly of sepulchres
but a treasury of humiliation? a huge pile of reiterated homilies on the
emptiness of renown and the certainty of oblivion.'

So does that 'mournful magnificence' of which he speaks, seem to have
weighed on him, that he takes for the motto of his whole essay, that
grand Elizabethan epigram--

When I behold, with deep astonishment,
To famous Westminster how there resort
Living in brasse or stony monument,
The Princes and the worthies of all sort;
Do I not see re-formed nobilitie,
Without contempt, or pride, or ostentation,
And look upon offenseless majestie,
Naked of pomp or earthly domination?
And how a play-game of a painted stone
Contents the quiet, now, and silent sprites,
Whom all the world, which late they stood upon,