I invited emotions and they accepted with thanks. They came in crowds, rushing, and soon I was unqualifiedly certain that I would rather be dead in Westminster Abbey than alive out of it. Having reached this important decision, I broke off my emotions at their height and went home.
The next day, as the sunlight touched Burns’s uplifted brow, I was there again, and the next, and the next.
The first impressions being comfortably over, Shakespeare and I became very good friends, without the necessity for heaving breast and suppressed tears on my part.
I had affable feelings, too, toward many of the other great and near-great. It amused me to learn how many succeeded in getting into the Abbey by the mere accident of dying while there was plenty of room.
John Gay, they tell me, is one of the interlopers, and his epitaph,
Life is a jest and all things show it;
I thought so once, but now I know it,
is dubbed irreverent.
But to my mind the irreverence is not in the sentiment, but in the fact that it is placed upon his tomb, the responsibility therefore, even though Gay requested it, lying with his survivors. Surely the man who wrote Trivia is as much entitled to honor as many others whose virtues are set forth in stone.
But if any one is disturbed by Gay’s irreverence, he has only to step through the door which is close at hand, into the little chapel of St. Faith.