While most of our party are attracted towards the last two conspicuous monuments, the Non-conformists, should any be amongst us, are sure to linger by the mural tablet, with medallion portrait heads, which Dean Stanley allowed the Wesleyans to put here in memory of the brothers John and Charles Wesley. Upon it are the appropriate words: "I look upon all the world as my parish," which John Wesley literally interpreted. Near by was already the memorial to Dr. Isaac Watts, the great dissenting minister of an earlier generation, whose hymns are still popular in church and chapel alike, as are to a greater degree those of Charles Wesley.
To a Frenchman or Italian a humbler tablet on the opposite side with a long inscription is of more interest, for it commemorates Pasquale de Paoli, the champion of Corsican independence, who took refuge in England, the home of liberty, and died here in 1807. The ladies, leaving the men to their study of the seamen and soldiers, with whose names the walls are covered, ask for information about the bust of a young woman, just beyond Paoli. Grace Gethin, although the only authoress in the Abbey who has a monument to herself,—for the learned Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, shares her husband's tomb in the north transept,—has no real claim to this distinction. Her immortal work, which she bequeathed to an admiring circle of blue-stockings, proved to be a mere book of extracts culled from popular writers. The playwright, Congreve, whose own medallion is below the Abbot's Pew in the nave, showed his want of literary cultivation by not only composing a poem in praise of the young writer, but allowing it to be published as a preface to the book, which went through several editions before the fraud was discovered. The annual sermon, which was long preached in the Abbey in memory of the youthful heiress (she was only twenty-one) who left a bequest for the purpose in her will, has become a thing of the past.
While the artistic persons with us have been bewailing the ruthless destruction of the wall arcading and will have cause to lament still louder in the transepts, the student of heraldry is attracted to some defaced shields which repay a closer attention, and have helped antiquaries to fix the dates of the choir and nave. The Confessor's, with the familiar five birds, and Henry the Third's arms with three lions are easily identified in this aisle, and the learned in such matters point out many others, chiefly the coats of Henry's relations, such as his father-in-law, Raymond de Beranger, Count of Provence, and his brother Richard, King of the Romans, one of the royal princes selected to carry St. Edward's coffin from the palace to the new shrine.
We have now reached the crossing, and should all our party desire to make an exhaustive circuit of the church to-day, the south transept is our next goal. When time presses it is wisest for the guide to pause here, merely point out the Statesmen's Aisle and the Poets' Corner, and then pass on at once through the iron gates to the royal chapels.
