Numbers of visitors were straying in and out of the Abbey, looking at the monuments, criticising the works of art, the mural tablets, or gossiping over the ashes of dead Kings, as if they were in a concert room, while here and there might be seen some scholar or learned man delving for facts, and poring over the musty Latin of the crumbling tombs.
In Westminster Abbey rival statesmen rest in peace, the tongue of the orator is mute, side by side rest the Crowned head and the Chancellor with his great seal, the Archbishop and the Play-actor, the philanthropist and the seaman, who died by his guns on the deck of the vessel of war, the divine and the physician, the Princess and the Soubrette, all mingle common dust together.
In Westminster Abbey, the powerful, spiritual, Roman Catholic prelate has celebrated High Mass with more than Eastern magnificence, the Introit has issued forth from his lips, and the acolytes have answered his "Dominus Vobiscum" with their "Amen;" and here the stern Puritan has knelt in his less formal prayer.
Here the dread sentence of excommunication has been launched forth in all its terrors from the lips of Papal legates, enthroned, and in Abbot John Estney's room Caxton printed the first English Bible.
Here the magnificence and pomps of the coronation of a King have been followed by the solemn and beautiful burial service for the dead, and the pealing organ, and the swelling choir, reverberating through the lofty grey-grown aisles, have chained men's minds to the power of Almighty God.
DIMENSIONS OF THE ABBEY.
Westminster Abbey is the finest and noblest specimen of Gothic architecture in all England.
