Honoured by such a trust, we who serve God daily in the great Abbey are not unmindful of the duty which lies on us to preserve and to restore, to the best of our power, the general fabric; and to call on government and on private persons to preserve and restore those monuments, for which they, not we, are responsible. A stranger will not often enter our Abbey without finding somewhere or other among its vast arcades, skilled workmen busy over mosaic, marble, bronze, or ‘storied window richly dight;’ and the very cloisters, which to Washington Irving’s eye were ‘discoloured with damp, crumbling with age, and crusted with a coat of hoary moss,’ are being repaired till that ‘rich tracery of the arches, and that leafy beauty of the roses which adorn the keystones’—of which he tells—shall be as sharp and bright as they were first, 500 years ago.
One sentiment, again, which was called up in the mind of your charming essayist, at the sight of Westminster Abbey, I have not felt myself: I mean its sadness. ‘What,’ says he, ‘is this vast assembly of
sepulchres but a treasury of humiliation? a huge pile of reiterated homilies on the emptiness of renown and the certainty of oblivion.’
So does that ‘mournful magnificence’ of which he speaks, seem to have weighed on him, that he takes for the motto of his whole essay, that grand Elizabethan epigram—
When I behold, with deep astonishment,
To famous Westminster how there resort
Living in brasse or stony monument,
The Princes and the worthies of all sort;
Do I not see re-formed nobilitie,
Without contempt, or pride, or ostentation,
And look upon offenseless majestie,
Naked of pomp or earthly domination?
And how a play-game of a painted stone
Contents the quiet, now, and silent sprites,
Whom all the world, which late they stood upon,
Could not content, nor quench their appetites.
Life is a frost of cold felicities;
And death the thaw of all our vanities.
True, true—who knows it not, who has lived fifty years in such a world as this?—and yet but half the truth.
Were there no after-life, no juster home beyond the grave, where each good deed—so spake the most august of lips—shall in no wise lose its reward—is it nought, virûm volitare per ora, to live upon the lips of
men, and find an immortality, even for a few centuries, in their hearts? I know what answer healthy souls have made in every age to that question; and what they will make to the end, as long as the respect of their fellow-creatures is, as our Creator meant that it should be, precious to virtuous men. And let none talk of ‘the play-game of a painted stone,’ of ‘the worthless honours of a bust.’ The worth of honour lies in that same worthlessness. Fair money wage for fair work done, no wise man will despise. But that is pay, not honour; the very preciousness whereof—like the old victor’s parsley crown in the Greek games—is that it had no value, gave no pleasure, save that which is imperishable, spiritual, and not to be represented by gold nor quintessential diamond.
Therefore, to me at least, the Abbey speaks, not of vanity and disappointment, but of content and peace.
The quiet now and silent sprites