In Westminster's venerable and beautiful Abbey, where I saw Gladstone buried last June, I can look on the bury-hole of Edward the Confessor, King of our remote Anglo-Saxon ancestors, and one of the prime founders of English liberties; I see the tomb of that butcher Edward who subdued Wales and overthrew Scotland's Wallace; here, too, is the grave of the third Edward, who, by his raiding and stealing, laid the foundations of England's glorious commerce. Here, under his Agincourt helmet, lies the valiant dust of Falstaff's Prince Hal, and of three other Royal Henrys. Bloody Mary rests from her fiery rage; Mary Queen of Scots is united in death to her terrible foe, Elizabeth of England; and two Stuart Kings repose uncomplainingly by the side of William of Orange.
Here mighty troublers of the earth,
Who swam to sov'reign rule through seas of blood;
The oppressive, sturdy, man-destroying villains,
Who ravag'd kingdoms, and laid empires waste,
And in a cruel wantonness of power
Thinn'd states of half their people, and gave up
To want the rest; now, like a storm that's spent,
Lie hushed.
From these crumbled majesties I turn with reverence to aisles hallowed by the mould of Darwin, Dickens, Thackeray, Browning, Macaulay, Livingstone, Garrick, and Handel.
Beneath St. Paul's great dome my gratitude can tender homage to the names of Titanic Turner, Reynolds, Landseer, Napier, Cornwallis, Wellington, and Nelson.
Think what a procession if all these could be sprinkled with the Water of Life! If to each fragment of noble dust in this huge, unshapely, and overgrown wilderness of masonry, one could call back the soul that sometime quickened it, what a great city, in Walt Whitman's sense, would London be!
Every town cherishes the sacred memory of its own particular great man, but London bears in its bosom intimate and familiar tokens of them all. The city and its neighbourhood for miles round are marked with historic and literary associations. The place is all composed of great men's fame and chapters of world-history. London Clay is made of London's Pride, and London Pride grows in the London Clay.
Not a quarter, not a suburb is free of hallowed associations.
Within half an hour's stroll from my home at Highgate I can visit the pleasaunce of which Andrew Marvell wrote—
I have a garden of my own,
But so with roses overgrown,
And lilies, that you would it guess
To be a little wilderness.
I cross the threshold of the adjoining house, and stand within the actual domicile of staid Andrew's improper neighbour, Mistress Nell Gwynne. It was from a window of this house she threatened to drop her baby, unless her Merry Monarch would there and then confer name and title on him; and thus came England into the honour and glory of a ducal race of St. Albans.