Mrs. D. retorted that he ought to have been ashamed of himself, which struck me as inconsistent. Parr's first wife had no doubt been dead a great many years, and all those years he had presumably been waiting for the end which never came. When, at the age of 120, he found himself still alive, and still hale and hearty, he would begin to think it was about time to accept things as they were and start life all over again. That my thoughts in Poet's Corner, by the way, concerned themselves with "Old Parr" to the exclusion of Garrick, Johnson, Thackeray, Dickens, Coleridge, and Spenser, the "Prince of Poets," must have been Mrs. D.'s fault.
I prefer Monday for a visit to the chapels, not because one saves sixpence, but because I never follow in the footsteps of a guide without a humiliating sense of being one of a hungry mob of chickens round the man with the bag of grain. It is much more exciting to go pecking about on your own, and on Mondays you can loiter unmolested where you will, and for as long as you will.
The north aisle of Henry VII's Chapel, where Queen Elizabeth is buried, invariably draws me, and I led the way there, first. Strangely enough, it is often empty, and always quiet. One's thoughts of Elizabeth mingle curiously with those of her hated half-sister, "Bloody Queen Mary," who is buried below Elizabeth, and who was, according to Sandford, "interred without any monument or other remembrance".
It is strange to note the unequal distribution of favours in the matter of burial. Charles II, for instance, has nothing more than his name and the dates of his birth and death recorded in small letters on the pavement of the chapel in the south aisle. Pepys says of Charles, "He was very obscurely buried at night without any manner of pomp, and soon forgotten after all his vanity".
Addison is near Queen Elizabeth, and close to his friend Charles Montague, first Earl of Halifax. Reference to the fact is quaintly made in the two concluding lines of the Addison's epitaph:—
"Oh for ever gone; take this last adieu,
And sleep in peace next thy lov'd Montague."
The place is narrow and rather dark. It would have been more befitting Elizabeth's magnificence had she been laid amidst the colour and pomp of the chapel of Henry VII. One would think, too, that she had a restless neighbour in "Bloody Queen Mary". The words of the Latin inscription perhaps make a mute appeal for charity for the latter when they say, "Consorts both in throne and grave, in the hope of one resurrection".
Against the east wall is a sarcophagus containing bones found at the foot of a staircase in the Bloody Tower, and supposed to be those of the two princes who were murdered in the Tower by their uncle. Yes, Elizabeth has eerie company, and somehow, in the cold grey light of this dim corner of the Abbey, it is not the Elizabeth described by Green, the historian, as that "brilliant, fanciful, unscrupulous child of earth, and the Renaissance," of whom we think, but the dying, lonely woman who, her mind unchanged, her old courage gone, "called for a sword to be constantly beside her, and thrust it from time to time through the arras as if she heard murderers stirring there". What a subject for a picture!
The quarters were struck by the chiming of the Abbey clock inside, and the booming of Big Ben outside, and as we wandered from chapel to chapel I was wooing those lurking beauties of the building which wait patiently for the day, the hour, and the man who is to find out their loveliness. The ordinary visitor is mostly too engaged in picking up crumbs of information to have leisure to lift his eyes to the sculptured figures which stand aloft in the blue haze of encroaching twilight. Neither does he catch the secret flame of some obscure window which suddenly shines out like a sinking sun through the forest of pillars and arches, nor notice the jealous little doors to which only the privileged have the key. I found one such this afternoon in the Chapel of Edward the Confessor, but when I put my eye to the keyhole, nothing but darkness rewarded my curiosity. Mrs. Darling asked me if I'd ever had any luck with keyholes, and I was obliged to admit that I hadn't—still, one never knows.
There was no need to peer through the keyhole of the door leading to the Islip Chamber, because for the moderate sum of threepence we were admitted without parley.