of whom old Christolero sings, they are content; and well for them that they should be. They have received their nation’s thanks, and ask no more, save to lie there in peace. They have had justice done them; and more than one is there, who had scant justice done him while alive. Even Castlereagh is there, in spite of Byron’s and of Shelley’s scorn. It may be that they too have found out ere now, that there he ought
to be. The nation has been just to him who, in such wild times as the world had not seen for full three hundred years, did his duty according to his light, and died in doing it; and his sad noble face looks down on Englishmen as they go by, not with reproach, but rather with content.
Content, I say, and peace. Peace from their toil, and peace with their fellow-men. They are at least at rest. Obdormierunt in pace. They have fallen asleep in peace. The galled shoulder is freed from the collar at last. The brave old horse has done his stage and lain down in the inn. There are no more mistakes now, no more sores, no more falls; and no more whip, thank God, laid on too often when it was least needed and most felt.
And there are no more quarrels, too. Old personal feuds, old party bickerings, old differences of creed, and hatreds in the name of the God of love—all those are past, in that world of which the Abbey is to me a symbol and a sacrament. Pitt and Fox, Warren Hastings and Macaulay, they can afford to be near to each other in the Abbey; for they understand each other now elsewhere; and the Romish Abbot’s bones do not stir in their grave beside the bones of the Protestant Divine whom he, it may be, would have burned alive on earth.
In the south aisle of Henry the VIIth’s Chapel lies in royal pomp she who so long was Britain’s
bane—‘the daughter of debate, who discord still did sow’—poor Mary Queen of Scots. But English and Scots alike have forgotten the streams of noble blood she cost their nations; and look sadly and pityingly upon her effigy—why not?
Nothing is left of her
Now but pure womanly.
And in the corresponding aisle upon the north, in a like tomb—which the voice of the English people demanded from the son of Mary Stuart—lies even a sadder figure still—poor Queen Elizabeth. To her indeed, in her last days, Vanity of vanities—all was vanity. Tyrone’s rebellion killed her. ‘This fruit have I of all my labours which I have taken under the sun’—and with a whole book of Ecclesiastes written on her mighty heart, the old crowned lioness of England coiled herself up in her lair, refused food, and died, and took her place henceforth opposite to her ‘dear cousin’ whom she really tried to save from herself—who would have slain her if she could, and whom she had at last, in obedience to the voice of the people of England, to slay against her will. They have made up that quarrel now.
Ay, and that tomb is the sacred symbol of a reconciliation even more pathetic and more strange. Elizabeth lies—seemingly by her own desire—in the same vault as her own sister, Mary Tudor. ‘Bloody
Mary,’ now, no more. James the First, who had no love for either of them, has placed at the head of the monument ‘two lines,’ as has been well said, ‘full of a far deeper feeling than we should naturally have ascribed to him’—