SOMETIME in the sixth century a Saxon King, named Sebert, founded an Abbey, where Westminster now stands. It is another of the regular show places of London, and possibly the most interesting, unless it be the Tower. It has been rebuilt a dozen or more times, and is really the most beautiful building in London of its class.
EXTERIOR OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY.
The Abbey is three hundred and seventy-five feet in length, by two hundred in width, and its height from the pavement to the foot of the lantern is one hundred and forty feet. I know this, for I got it from the guide-book.
There is nothing in England, in the way of architecture, more striking or grand. The beautiful is not always the grand, or the grand the beautiful. Westminster Abbey is both. The old architects might not have been able to have built the Capitol at Washington, and they certainly could not have built the Court House in New York, and made it cost more than the Houses of Parliament, for they were not that kind of architects; they mostly died poor and did not wear diamonds, but they managed to erect a building that is worth the passage across the Atlantic to see.