The other lady here commemorated, Mrs. Montagu, was a Shakspearian, lived among the learned and eminent, and founded the Blue Stocking Club.
“I remember well the house she built,” replied Mr. Hertford; “it stood like a respectable old country house in its garden in Portman Square, and has been enlarged into Lord Portman’s mansion. She covered her drawing-room walls with feathers, as Cowper writes:—
“‘The birds put off their every hue
To dress a house for Montagu.’
What a gay May-day the sweeps had with their ribbons, flowers, and feasting in the good lady’s time! We read on this tablet that she had ‘the united advantages of beauty, wit, judgment, reputation, and riches.’”
“What a happy woman!” exclaimed Miss Hertford. “I once heard a girl asked which she would rather be—handsome, clever, or rich. The questioner never imagined that any one could be all three.”
Higher up on the same side, near the stairs, is a memorial to Boles, the Royalist “Collonell of a Ridgment of Foot who did wounders at the Battle of Edgehill.” No doubt he did, for when finally he was, with eighty men, surrounded by five thousand rebels in the church at Alton, he held out for six hours, and after killing six or seven with his own sword was himself slain with sixty of his men.
“Winchester is rich in monuments,” I said. “It preceded Westminster as the burial-place of the great and has, with that exception, more human interest than any other sacred edifice in England.”
Wykeham’s Chantry.
On the opposite side of the Nave stands the Chantry of Wykeham, of great height and beautiful elaboration.[75] It happens by design or accident that if we supposed our Lord’s body to be lying on the cross of the original Cathedral, the site of this monument would correspond with the wound in His side. This was the favourite spot at which Wykeham prayed when a boy, before an altar to the Virgin; and here he built his tomb, on which his figure has reposed for nearly five hundred years, and where it may remain for five hundred more. The good he did was not destined to be “interred with his bones,” and the line on the resting-place of Wren, whose truth impresses the reader, might without impropriety have been also engraved here—