At Canterbury we saw the Cathedral. I know not how it was, whether my mind had been prepared by the previous sight of glorious nature to receive pleasing impressions, but the spot where the high altar and Thomas à Becket's tomb stood seemed to me one of the most beautiful effects that I had ever seen arising from Saxo-Gothic architecture; for, though it had not all the airiness and awe-inspiring height that I had seen in other cathedrals, yet its simple beauty pleased me more than anything I had yet seen.
Remounting, we soon arrived at Dover, where we slept, when the packet-boat captain had sufficiently disturbed us.
April 25.—This day was spent at Dover. The greater part was occupied in procuring what had been neglected in London, and in seeing the carriage well packed up. After dinner, however, we went in search of Churchill's tomb, raised, we had learned, to his memory by his friend Wilkes. Arrived at the house of the sexton, he led us to a ruined church, passing through which we came into a churchyard, where children, heedless and unconscious of what they trampled on, sportively ran amid the raised turf graves. He pointed out to us a tombstone, undistinguished from those of the tradesmen near him, having merely, like them, a square tablet stuck into the ground, whereon was written, "Here lie the remains of the celebrated Churchill.
"Life to the last enjoyed, here Churchill lies.
Candidate."
[By Churchill.] The green turf was beginning already to decay upon his tomb, which when the sexton heard us lamenting he assured us that his grave, as well as the rest, would be newly decked as soon as Nature had vested its fullest green—for that was an old custom. Churchill owed, then, only to a common hand what the pride of a friend refused—the safety of his burial-place. Wilkes only sought the gratification of his vanity. While he consigned his friend's last relics to the keeping of a tablet, he consigned his own pride in such a friend to the keeping of a column in his own grounds. Yet I do not know whether the scene was not more moving, though no vainly pompous inscription pointed out the spot where this poet was buried.
There were two authors; one, the most distinguished of his age; another, whose name is rising rapidly; (and a third, ambitious for literary distinction). What a lesson it was for them when, having asked the sexton if he knew why so many came to see this tomb, he said: "I cannot tell; I had not the burying of him."
[Byron, after settling in the Villa Diodati near Geneva, recorded this same incident in a composition entitled Churchill's Grave, a Fact Literally Rendered. He wrote a memorandum to say that in this poem he had intentionally imitated the style of Wordsworth, "its beauties and its defects." The composition therefore is essentially un-Byronic in method, and perhaps Wordsworth would not have recognized in it many of his own "beauties." The lines are as follows—
"I stood beside the grave of him who blazed
The comet of a season, and I saw