giants of olden times-other days, of their illustrious ones.-Ah! illustrious ones, indeed, 'tis admitted, great men with little aims, ranked with such as Cæsar Augustus, and Alexander the Great. But be it yours to receive a mould from communion with a higher nobility than any of which the world could ever boast, a peerage found only in the pages of inspiration. No names are the equals of those on the roll of the Church of the First-born, no biography like that of the Bible.

In the later portion, have we not Peter haranguing at Pentecost; and Paul reasoning at Athens? And in the earlier, have we not Moses clothed with power, though stricken with terror, at Horeb; and Elijah, determining the long-pending controversy, by the descent of fire, on Mount Carmel? And as the Church, first Jewish, then Christian, has held on its way from age to age, has it not handed down to us watchwords and palms ? We have inspiriting antecedents; we entered upon life wealthily, we were born rich-rich in the hoarded incidents of all the ages. Others have laboured, and we have entered into their labours; they put down the keel of the vessel which we launch; they laid the broad basement of the building which we are helping to rear. They scattered the seed the harvest of which we reap. The devout dead have made us their debtors, inheritors, and heirs. The ranks of our own Community have been repeatedly severed. We have already buried veterans, have gathered up our honoured dead, both from our Churches at home and our Missions abroad. Princes in our Israel have fallen. Still the Churches survive. God buries His workmen, yet carries on His work. Other watchmen guard the city; other hands grasp the standard; other leaders bid to the battle. O! let us act worthy of an ancestry so distinguished for their truer zeal their lordlier chivalry. As you succeed to their office, as you sustain their responsibilities, as you pronounce their Shibboleth, may you also catch their mantle! By some it has been caught.

"The ancient spirit is not dead':

Old times, methinks, are breathing here."

"God of our fathers, be the God

Of their succeeding race."

May you, brethren, be all that you are scripturally required to be. In spirit tender, just like your Master. Jesus wept. In habit earnest-not locusts in the world's vineyard-not drones in its hive-workmen that need not to be ashamed-examples to the flock-good ministers of Jesus Christ.

(To be continued.)

Westminster Abbey.

"Unclasp the world's close armour from thy heart,
Dismiss the gay companion from thy side,
And, if thou cans't, elude the practised art
And dull recitative of venal guide;

So shalt thou come aright, with reverent tread,
Unto this solemn city of the dead;

Nor uninstructed 'mid its haunts abide,

But o'er the dust of heroes moralize,

And learn that humbling lore, which makes the spirit wise." SOME time ago, it was our fortune to visit the ruins of one of our old baronial castles. They were near to a quiet out-of-the-way hamlet, such as tourists occasionally stumble on, when for a time they free themselves from the trammels of guide-books, and forsake the common track of travel. Passing through the village, a collection of humble cottages, interspersed with a few substantial farm houses, we came to the foot of a lofty hill, on the summit of which rose the remains that were the object of our pilgrimage. Despite the lapse of years, they still stood darkly and massively, but sadly withal, against the blue sky. Climbing the hill, we soon passed through a huge gateway, partially destroyed, and were in the very midst of the mournful desolation. Here and there portions of the walls yet existed, and, with the aid of the imagination, we tried to realise the original plan of the feudal residence. But it was no easy thing to do this; for the greater part of the place was covered by shapeless masses of stone, some of them half buried in the earth, and all of them green with the moss of centuries. What had been the Keep, however, was still left in tolerable, or rather, comparative preservation. Even in it, the birds had discovered some crumbling crevices in which to build their nests, whilst the silence was only broken by their subdued twittering, by our own footfalls, and the cawing of the rooks, so like a lament, as they swooped round it. As we wandered through courts that had once echoed to the tread of many feet; gazed on broken, ivy-mantled arches through which mailed warriors had passed to the battle in the brave days of yore, or gay dames and pleasure-loving squires had gone to the hawking or the chase; lingered in the halls where feast, and wassail, and song had been held and heard in the old, old times; peered into the gloomy jaws of dungeons where, perchance, many a noble captive had fretted out his life;-an indescribable feeling of melancholy-sorrowful, but not altogether unpleasing-crept over us and testified to the mysterious power that dwelt in these mementoes of the past. The secret of the influence exerted upon us did not lie in the mere fact of the antiquity of everything around us, although overturned walls and buttresses, shattered entrances and dismantled towers, bore unmistakeable evidence to the passage of time, but in the associations of that antiquity. Age is not, in the abstract, a beautiful thing; but in its poetical aspect, and in many of its relations, it has an unutterable charm and a wondrously potent spell.

It was with precisely similar emotions-with the addition of the religious element-to those which stirred within us as we slowly rambled through that illustration of Norman pomp, that we strolled through the aisles and chapels of Westminster Abbey. True, the Abbey is not a ruin. The towers and pinnacles spring up as bravely as ever from that grand old pile, but it has the attribute of age; nor are the delicately traced arches, the elaborately decorated tombs, or the carved screen-work, without marks of the ravages which it entails. Much of the building is grey and mouldering. Grotesque heads have lost much of the meaning the chisel once gave them; many of the effigies that adorn the mausoleums of knights and kings, are headless or otherwise mutilated; some of the inscriptions are worn and hard to be deciphered; even the solid oak that adds to the magnificence of the place, has not escaped the attacks of the ignoble worm. That man's mental condition is not to be envied, who can visit the Abbey without having his thoughts quickened, and without deeply feeling its sad beauty.

The metropolis is, par excellence, the City of Sights. Not a day passes but thousands flock up to it for the purpose of seeing its wonders; and though the Abbey, of course, is down on their lists of lions, it is to be feared that many of them visit it with less interest than that with which they inspect Tussaud's Waxworks, or ascend the Monument, and see in its

"Storied urns and animated busts

nothing but meaningless baubles. But many, let us hope, visit it with a profound appreciation of the significance of its solemn grandeurs. John Bull is not so utterly destitute of poetical taste as some of his continental neighbours self-complacently believe. The old gentleman often practically acknowledges that better things exist than stocks and shares, prize oxen, and the like. The care that is lavished on the Abbey is a proof of this. We make this affirmation in the teeth of the countenance given of late to the notion formed of him, by the proceedings of our railway Vandals, men who would not scruple to turn the Holy Sepulchre itself, supposing its real site were known, and it were under their control, into an engine factory, if any pecuniary advantage were likely to accrue.

Reader, have you ever seen Westminster Abbey ? Understand us; we do not mean to ask whether you have rushed through it at the heels of vergers, who generally seem as if they were trying to imitate the monotonous gabbling of jays or parrots, and who have about as much sense of the meaning and attraction of the relics they exhibit as those discordant birds would have; but whether you have seen it alone; whether you have paced beneath those lofty vaults and held communion with your own thoughts, with no one to disturb your contemplations; whether the hours passed away unheeded, and a sense of your own insignificance stole over you, as you moved through those dim passages; passed from tomb to tomb, from trophy to trophy; wondered at the graceful strength of the clustered pillars; or paused to drink in the inspiration of the scene. If so, then you may answer our query in the affirmative.

Westminster Abbey has always appeared to us far more adapted to inspire and excite the religious feelings of men than its sister edifice, St. Paul's Cathedral. This we believe is, to some extent, owing to the style of the architecture. There is a something in the Gothic, which fits it, above every other, for sacred purposes; and to us it never seems so appropriately employed as when applied to the construction of churches. There is a warmth about it (is that the right way of expressing it, Mr. Ruskin ?) which is possessed by no other. You enter St. Paul's, and as you gaze round the building, or look up into its glorious dome, you are bewildered with the vastness of it, but few of your finer feelings are touched. You enter the Abbey, and scarcely have you crossed the threshhold ere your inmost soul responds to the melodies of the place and becomes as an Eolian harp which the winds of heaven are waking to divine music. You enter St. Paul's, and you glory in the skill that called such a triumph of art into existence, but little more. You enter the Abbey, and with your admiration is associated a devotion, coming from your heart's core, to Him whose temple it is. Nor are you annoyed at the Abbey, as you are continually at St. Paul's, with the presence of heaps of unsightly scaffolding and bloused workmen devouring Brobdignagian slices of bread and cheese, or making a hideous rattling of hammers. We would suggest to the Dean and Chapter that, though these things may be necessary occasionally, yet, as institutions of the Cathedral, we can regard them in no other light than as public nuisances.

It was on a summer's afternoon that we first visited the Abbey, and strolled among its touching, time-hoared glories. We entered by Poet's Corner. Service was proceeding at the time, and hardly for the moment noticing the statues, medallions, and tablets, with which that particular spot is crowded, with bared head and profound reverence, we listened to the reading of the chaste and eloquent words of the Establishment's prayers. Anon came the sweet chant. ing of the choristers, who, in their white gowns, and in the gloom of the old building, looked like beings from another world. Then, the peal of the organ, as it rolled out vast volumes of sound-now seem ing like a wail of sorrow, and again, like a grand burst of triumph. How its tones resounded and echoed through aisle and cloister, chapel and nave; and how like dying thunder they were, as they gradually softened into silence amid the deep arches of the roof! As we stood there, it was as if we had been suddenly, and in some mysterious manner, transported to that temple, the songs of which, inspired by the Eternal and sung by no human voices, are as the sound of many waters. It was as if we were allowed for awhile to rejoice in those harmonies that make glad the City of God.

Pausing for a time in Poet's Corner, after the benediction had been pronounced, we busied ourselves with the memorials of great spirits long since passed away. The most striking to us were the statues of Shakespeare, Campbell, and Addison; a superb piece of sculpture erected to the memory of "John, the Great Duke of Argyll;" a small medallion bearing the words "O, Rare Ben Jonson;" and a

restored tablet in honor of Spencer. The quaint inscription on the last, especially arrested our attention. "HEARE LYES (EXPECTING THE SECOND COMMINGE OF OVR SAVIOVR CHRIST IESVS) THE BODY OF EDMOND SPENCER THE PRINCE OF POETS in HIS TYME WHOSE DIVINE SPIRRIT NEEDS NOE OTHIR WITNESSE THEN THE WORKS WHICH HE LEFTE BEHINDE HIM. HE WAS BORNE IN LONDON in the yeare 1553 and DIED IN THE YEARE 1598." Casting a glance on the ground, we found ourselves standing on a large slab inscribed to David Garrick.

Everywhere the eye lighted on names dear to the national heart; names on which

Here, the name of one who gave us the "Open Sesame" into regions of thought, the very existence of which had before been almost unknown to us: there, that of one whose words have stirred our heroism and fired our ambition; yonder, that of one whose verse has been to us a light in darkness, a solace in grief, and a joy in joy. Sculpture may

"Give bond in stone and ever during brass, To guard them, and to immortalise her trust;" but their fame is safer in the truth their possessors uttered, than in any monument.

Reluctantly we passed on to other parts of the Abbey. Stepping into the chapels, we were at once surrounded by the tombs and dust of our kings, queens, and nobles, a few of them good, many indifferent, and more thoroughly bad. Historic recollections crowded upon us; sayings and deeds that have been the wonder of the ages, were called to our remembrance. As we surveyed the resting-places of those whose nod once shook empires and plunged Europe into war, and considered what mighty revolutions have swept and are sweeping through the nations, and that they lie there unheeded, with no vcice in them, we were sadly and forcibly impressed with the fleeting character of all earthly power. In no place may such solemn lessons be learnt as in those decaying halls; the very stones are voiceful.

To many now sleeping within the precincts of this venerable pile, the hope that it might become their final resting-place, was a keen stimulus, as they girded themselves for the political arena, or entered on the sterner warfare of opposing fleets and armies. The words of the brave Nelson, uttered just before the battle of the Nile,-"A peerage or Westminster Abbey,"--will not soon be forgotten. The peerage he soon obtained; and, at last, found a tomb, if not in Westminster Abbey, in a temple scarcely less worthy of his dust. But what avails it now, to those once mighty ones, that their ashes repose here, and that their names are engraved in marble and brass? Could we but know the views they now entertain of what they erst looked at as a noble object of ambition, and the feelings with which they contemplate the remains of what was