opened up, without seriously considering any building proposals.

The first impulse of the cultivated person, who loves art and understands something of the principles of architecture, is to sweep away all the unsightly monuments which disfigure the Abbey walls, quite regardless of the historical side of the question. Until recently the impossibility of carrying out this idea was patent enough, for there is no national storehouse where these outcasts could be housed. But since the annexe to the Abbey has been discussed as a probability a solution has been proposed in the removal of these masses of masonry to the new chapel.

Amongst the memorials of the dead to be thus displaced, some would not only include the obscurer persons, but also the statues of statesmen, such as the incongruous figure of Peel addressing the house in a Roman toga, or that of the younger Pitt above the west door. If these went, the large monument to Chatham must certainly be dislodged from the north transept, and the equally cumbrous one to Henry Fox, Lord Holland, which is often called the Prison-house of Death, from the northwest tower. With these would naturally go a multitude of statues, busts, and large tablets, of other statesmen; of poets whose poems have long been left unread, even where their names survive in literature; of philanthropists; of soldiers and sailors. In fact, were the scheme once actually adopted, it would be difficult to know where to stop.

The idea is attractive enough at first sight, but the result is apparent to all who know the Abbey well, while it is not likely to strike the casual observer. For in many, if not in most, places the old wall-arcading has long been defaced to make room for those very monuments which are now an eyesore to us, and were they removed nothing but a blank, and often unsightly, space would be found behind them.

I do not suppose that those who desire to make a clean sweep of the artistic failures here have ever considered the question in detail. If they have, it

would be interesting to know whether they propose merely to repair the old wall, or to replace the ancient wallarcading by a modern copy. Supposing the restoration to be feasible, there are other things to be taken into consideration, the chief being the historical point of view-not only the history of individuals, but the history of art. The tendency of each century, often of each generation, is to condemn the taste of the one before it, and therefore to desire the destruction of the works most admired by their forefathers. Thus, in the eighteenth century the classic ideal was all the rage, and the great architect, Sir Christopher Wren, who superintended the necessary repairs of the Abbey fabric, had no sympathy with Gothic architecture. So, instead of restoring the thirteenth and fourteenth century work exactly as he found it, he ruthlessly destroyed the remains, and put in his own ideas. The north façade, for instance, which has since been restored back to the thirteenth-century architecture under Mr. Pearson, was re-faced after Wren's plans in a pseudo-classical style; and the pepper-box western towers were added by one of Wren's followers, in accordance with the deceased master's designs.

It may be said that examples of this kind have little to do with the wholesale removal of monuments; but they are good illustrations of the change of taste from one century to another, and warn us of the caution which should be used with regard to any scheme for restoring the interior of the Abbey to its original state. Much has been done during the last twenty years in the way of cutting down unsightly monuments to less preposterous proportions, and so clearing the windows in the nave, many of which were formerly quite blocked up. A memorable instance is the once famous "Pancake Monument," an unsightly erection by Read, Roubiliac's pupil. "That figure of his, of Admiral Tyrrell going to heaven out of the sea, looks for all the world as if he were hanging from a gallows with a rope round his neck,"

was Nollekens's comment. Dean Stanley, however, caused this colossus to be very properly curtailed, the clouds cut away, and the grotesque figure put away in the triforium. A glaring disfigurement to the view from the choir of the north ambulatory is, unfortunately, a national monument put up by king and Parliament to the great General Wolfe, and therefore difficult to interfere with. But if only the theatrical representation of the hero's death, which is now so painfully conspicuous, could be removed, a more fitting memorial of his valor would remain in the fine bronze bas-relief, by Capizzoldi, depicting the famous ascent of the Heights of Abraham. The sculpture was Joseph Wilton's first public work, and so pleased was the dean (Zachary Pearce) with it, that, had it not been for the protest of Horace Walpole, he would actually have placed it in the Sanctuary. The beautiful tomb of Aymer de Valence was to have been destroyed to make room for it, and Pearce gave as the excuse for his proposal that he had heard the said Aymer belonged to "a very wicked set of people," the Knights Templars. Although the dean was persuaded to give up his first project, he did not stay his destroying hand, for a place was cleared for the gigantic new monument by the destruction of a finely carved fifteenth-century screen, the gift of Abbot Esteney, which divided the Chapel of St. John the Evangelist from the ambulatory. The altar-tombs of the abbot himself and Sir John Harpedon (died 1457), which formed part of the screen, were muti. lated and displaced.

We condemn, and justly condemn, the dean here; but in this, as in other flagrant instances, the dean was not alone responsible, although he had the power of defending his own church, and refusing to allow the architecture to be defaced-a veto, unfortunately, never exercised in former times. In some places, notably where the wall arcading is quite cut away and a veneer of grey marble put at the back of the memorials, as on the north side of the

nave, private individuals were allowed their own way. In other instances, as in the case of Wolfe, the nation is guilty, and her heroes are nonored by appalling acts of vandalism. For instance, to the so-called committees of taste appointed to select each national monument we owe Nollekens's immense cenotaph which commemorates those three brave captains, Bayne, Blair, and Manners, who fell (1782) in one of Rodney's victorious naval engagements with the French in the West Indies. To make room for this the font was removed to the west end. Then, again, Admiral Howe's victory off Brest (1794) is recorded on two ugly pieces of sculpture, placed here by a grateful country. The first, to Captain Montagu, which now fills up the northwest tower, is by Flaxman; the second, to Captains Harvey and Hutt, is by the younger Bacon. Originally these monuments stood side by side upon the floor of the nave, each surrounded by an iron railing; but they were so much in the way that in Dean Vincent's time (he died 1815) another national committee of taste had Montagu's removed to its present position, while that to the two captains was very much reduced in proportions and lifted to the window-ledge. The latter originally stood upon a marble pedestal, upon which was a representation of the battleships in high relief; over it hovered a large angel, holding in one hand an olive-branch, in the other the scales of justice, symbolic of the peace with honor won by Howe's genius.

About the same time another windowledge was disfigured by a national monument to Spencer Perceval, the prime minister who was shot (1812) in the Lobby of the House of Commons. The scene of the murder is actually represented, and two life-size allegorical figures stand gazing down upon it. The East India Company also is guilty of many an enormity, perpetrated in honor of their brave servants. The wall-arcading near Fox's monument, for instance, is entirely destroyed, and the window partly blocked, by an allegorical erection in memory of Major

General Lawrence (died 1775), the hero of Trichinopoly, who deserved a memorial in better taste. Another Indian hero of that time is Vice-Admiral Watson (died 1757), remembered chiefly now for his rescue of the prisoners from the Black Hole of Calcutta, and for the capture of Chandernagore from the French, in which exploit he and Clive were associated. To the company we owe the defacement of the arches above the west doorway of the north transept, which are filled up and hidden by the palmtrees and Indian chiefs on Watson's memorial.

The foregoing are fair examples of the decadence in taste with regard to ecclesiastical monuments which had been going on ever since the Renaissance, and had first half-raised the recumbent figures from the altar-tombs, then placed them upright, clad for the most part in Roman armor, and now, in the eighteenth century, added groups of allegorical statues. Bess Russell (died 1601), the "Child of Westminster," was the first seated figure in the Abbey; then followed Francis Holles (died 1622), standing erect as a Roman warrior; but these were in the side-chapels, and it was not till about thirty or forty years later that the nave, north transept, and choir aisles began to be filled with monuments. Poet's Corner had been dedicated to poets from about 1620, when Spenser's memorial was placed in the vicinity of Chaucer's tomb (the present tablet only dates from 1778, but is a copy of the original). The earliest intrusion into the nave is a little mural monument to a Mrs. Jane Hill (died 1631), and it was long before her solitude was disturbed, and at first only by tablets to various private persons, including several boys, one of whom was a king's scholar. There is also a tablet of little merit, by Grinling Gibbons, the celebrated carver in wood, to another lady, Mrs. Beaufoy (died 1707). From early in the eighteenth century onwards the monuments became more and more numerous, ill now they jostle one another and conceal the beautiful lines of

the architecture. Yet of these only a very small number can be dismissed as wholly without interest to us now. For here we shall find the men who built up and helped to maintain our empire. The statesmen, the soldiers and sailors -some whose names are still famous; others, whose doughty deeds on land or exploits on the high seas would long since have been forgotten were it not for their records here. There are men of peace, too, side by side with men of war. The great philanthropists, Wilberforce and Fowell Buxton, whose efforts in the suppression of the slave trade can never be forgotten; the men of science, and engineers, such as James Watt, whose immense monument was allowed to intrude into the chapel of St. Paul. A few doctors' names are here also, notably the contemporaries Chamberlen. Freind, and Woodward, who all died in the same year (1728), and were rivals to the last.

It is only possible in these few pages to select a small number from this army of the dead, in the hope that the historic interest awakened in the persons commemorated may plead for their inartistic memorials.

Let into a large and ugly memorial to Sir Isaac Newton's nephew, John Conduitt, to the right of the west door, is a strip of marble with an inscription, composed by Dean Stanley, in memory of a young clergyman, whose scientific achievements were the more remarkable when the disadvantages of poverty and ill-health, which darkened his short life, are considered. Jeremiah Horrocks (died 1641) was a curate with 401. a year, not "passing rich," for his genius gave him wants above mere food and clothing, for which this modest stipend was not sufficient. At fifteen, when he entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge, as a sizar, Jeremiah was already a "very curious astronomer," and later, by the help of a cheap telescope, which he bought for half-a-crown, he set himself to observe the heavens, and, in spite of his inadequate instrument, discovered a phenomenon overlooked even by the great Kepler, though obscurely predicted by

He headed the lines on his own tablet there with the words, "For one that would not be buried in Westminster Abbey." Perhaps he had treasured up the dying words of his friend Sir Godfrey Kneller: "By God! I will not be buried in Westminster . . . they do bury fools there." Kneller's expressed wish to have the inartistic monument he had himself designed placed near his grave in Twickenham Church was, however, disregarded, and Pope had a hand in placing it in the Abbey, and wrote the extravagant epitaph beginning, "Kneller by Heaven, and not a master, taught."

This ugly cenotaph used to stand in a conspicuous position on the floor of the nave, but Dean Buckland removed it to the south aisle of the choir. Not far from Pope's exaggerated eulogy on Kneller is an epitaph by the poetlaureate Dryden which, in spite of its length and bombastic style, pays a just tribute to the hero of a lost cause. This commemorates Sir Palmes Fairborne (died 1680), one of the last governors of Tangier before it was finally abandoned to the Moors. Tangier was part of the dowry brought by Catherine of Braganza to Charles II., and during the score of years it belonged to the English crown much treasure was wasted and many brave lives lost in its defence. "This man of undaunted resolution and spirit" richly deserved a memorial here. The last lines of Dryden's inscription:

More bravely British generall never fell, Nor generall's death was e'er reveng'd

so well,

Which his pleas'd eyes beheld before

their close,

Follow'd by thousand victims of his foes,

allude to the fact that Fairborne, mortally wounded while defending the town against a desperate assault made by the Moors, watched the fighting for three days from a balcony, and lived to see his victorious troops march back with their prisoners into Tangier.

There is much to remind us of England's military and naval greatness in the Abbey; other memorials, too,

which recall her lost possessions, and many a hard-won victory the practical results of which have vanished into smoke, though the moral effect is to be traced in the traditions inherited by the men who still build up our empire in all quarters of the globe.' Minorca, for instance, is no longer ours, but its value while it was in our hands is demonstrated by the large monument against the choir screen raised to the conqueror of that island (1708), the first Earl Stanhope (died 1723), who, after eleven years of political life, was still regarded as a popular hero on the strength of this and other military exploits. The names of three later earls are inscribed upon his monument; and in the northwest tower is a small tablet to a brave young descendant, Pitt's nephew, Charles Stanhope, who fell at Corunna (1809), just a century after the elder Stanhope's victories. There are other names connected with Minorca here, and the island was long associated with England's greatness. John Duke of Argyll was the first governor, but Sir Richard Kane (died 1736), lieutenantgovernor for twenty and governor for three years, is a memory more closely linked with the history of Minorca. Kane first distinguished himself at the siege of Derry, in the Irish campaigns, and afterwards in Flanders, where he was wounded in that famous assault on Namur when his regiment (the 18th Foot) won the Nassau lion and badge. He was wounded again at Blenheim, and fought at Malplaquet, then took part in the Canadian expedition of 1711, and, after defending Gibraltar for eight months against the Spaniards, finally ended his career at Minorca. Amongst other benefits Kane made a road across the island, and half a century after his death was gratefully spoken of there as "that good man." Rysbrach's bust of him, with its strongly marked characteristic features and flowing hair, will be found in

1 Of Java, which we held only for five years, we are reminded by the statue of that philanthropic governor of the island, Sir Stamford Raffles (died Zoological Society. 1826), remembered nowadays as the founder of the