marvel indeed at the reed-like grace of the slender columns which ascend to the vault so far above him, and will look with dismay on the poverty of stained glass which is everywhere so apparent after the wild iconoclasm of the Commonwealth. But much will be made up to him in the splendid beauty of the triforium, the richness of the clustered colored Purbeck marbles, and the impressive harmony of proportion everywhere. All this he will come to realize if the crowds of people will let him; his first impression will be, if it be like our own, that it too nearly resembles a great art-gallery (which, indeed, it is) in the density of the thronging thousands who constantly pass to and fro, not all, alas! realizing fully what they came to see. But this is a necessary incident of the Abbey as the one spot in England which no traveller passes by, and of the hurried season during which most tourists visit it. The storied aisles of other great fanes happily see no such surging array; and it was our own good fortune that during our visit here certain repairs necessitated holding the week-day services in the chapel of Henry VII., whither none repaired except those who, like ourselves, came to worship, and where we

were so removed as to be unmolested by others who had less subjective occupation.

In 1065 A. D., only a few days before the death of the Confessor, the Abbey was consecrated, and the fame of the ascetic piety of the last Saxon king caused his successors, after two hundred years, to desire sepulture near his sacred dust deposited therein. Canonized in 1163 A. D., pilgrims flocked to his shrine, as to Becket's at Canterbury; and with William the Norman, whose conquest of England was but a year later than the Confessor's death, began the long line of coronations which have from that date never been intermitted here, except when the usurper Cromwell assumed his power in Westminster Hall. When Henry III. rebuilt the choir, he moved the Confessor's bones a little to the west, raised over them a lofty and imposing tomb whose remains we see to-day at the very heart of the sacred building, behind the high altar, and had himself buried beside them. Five kings and six queens lie closely round the shrine of the Saint: his own wife Editha, and Maud the wife of Henry I., whose marriage united the Saxon and Norman lines; Henry III., the second builder of the Abbey; Edward

I., the greatest of the Plantagenets, the founder of the House of Commons, and the "Hammer of the Scots," with his devoted wife Eleanor of Castile, whose joint coronations were the first in the present building; Henry V., Shakespeare's Prince Hal, and his wife Katharine of Valois, the ancestress of the Tudors, whose lofty chantry, crowned with shield, saddle, and helmet, spans the ambulatory between this chapel and that of Henry VII.; Edward III., the conqueror of France and father of the Black Prince, whose shield and sword of state stand against the great stone screen at the west of the chapel sculptured over with the history of the Confessor, and his wife Philippa; and hapless Richard II. and his wife Anne, the rebuilder of Westminster Hall, whose portrait hangs over the tombs of the Saxon King Sebert and of Queen Anne of Cleves at the south side of the sanctuary, as the earliest contemporaneous painting of an English sovereign, in whose reign pageantry reached its highest splendor at the court of Britain.

As with all monuments erected before the Reformation, the effigies here are recumbent; but many of them are sadly worn by time and spoliation, and some, like that of Edward I.,

VOL. II. 3

are bald in their simplicity. Here too these earlier monarchs are all buried above the ground. It is only with Henry VII. and his glorious chapel, first occupied as the Reformation dawned, that they began to be interred below it. But neither position has preserved the last resting place of royalty from desecration. Roman as well as Anglican pilgrims frequent the Confessor's shrine (which is now only of wood, without inscription or effigy, and dates only from Queen Mary's time), and some came to kneel in prayer before it as we stood by. Its base is of marble and mosaic from Italy; and thence Henry III. also brought the very curious mosaic pavement of the sanctuary, which delineates the duration of the world according to the Ptolemaic system. Against the Confessor's screen, within his chapel, stand the two great oaken Coronation Chairs. They are alike in appearance, but not in age or dignity. The newer one was made for Mary, when crowned with William III. In the elder, sovereigns have sat since Edward I. imbedded beneath its seat the "stone of Scone," which he brought back from conquered Scotland as a part of the ancient seat of the Scottish kings in Scone,

Iona, and Dunstaffnage; identified to the imaginative by tradition with Jacob's stone at Bethel, brought hither after age-long wanderings. It quits this spot only when removed to the front of the high altar at each of these solemn ceremonials; and it has never left the building except when Cromwell borrowed it for his own pageant. It is the prerogative of the Archbishop of Canterbury to crown all monarchs; and it was on these Deanery grounds that his precedency over the Archbishop of York was finally determined.

Straight east from here rises the most magnificent of Gothic chapels, reared by the first of the Tudors and the last mediæval king of England for his chantry as well as his tomb. It is in the usual place for a lady-chapel, the symbolism of its position beyond the sanctuary being that of the Virgin supporting the head of her Son, as he lies outstretched upon the Cross. Alas! for three centuries it was falling to decay, since it had the fortune to fall on evil days for the preservation of ecclesiastical art. But the beginning of the nineteenth century saw a complete restoration to its original glory, as the last triumph of Gothic art, ere it gave place to the classicism of St. Paul's.