In another chapel—a much humbler one, octagonal in shape, is the tomb of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke. He selected the chamber as the one in which he desired to be buried, and wrote the epitaph:
“Fulke Greville, Servant to Queen Elizabeth, Counsellor to King James, and Friend to Sir Philip Sidney.”
Upon the sarcophagus were the rusty helmet, sword and other pieces of armor he had worn without fear and without reproach;—a record in Old English outweighing with righteous and thoughtful people, the fulsome Latinity of Leicester’s Grecian altar and the labored magnificence of the “Beechum Chapel.”
CHAPTER VIII.
Oxford.
IMPRIMIS! we put up at the Mitre Tavern in Oxford.
Nota Bene: never to do it again.
It is an interesting rookery to look at—and to leave. Stuffiness and extortion were words that borrowed new and pregnant meaning from our sojourn in what we were recommended to try, as “a chawming old place. Best of service and cookery, you know, thoroughly respectable and—ah—historic and arntique, and all that, you know!”