"In a magnificent manner (he proceeds) the effigies was carried to the east end of Westminster Abbey, and placed in a noble structure, which was raised on purpose to receive it. It remained some time exposed to public view, the corpse having been some days before interred in Henry VII.'s Chapel."
In the account of the funeral obsequies of General Monk, Duke of Albemarle, in 1670, the writer says:
"Wren has acquitted himself so well, that the hearse, now that the effigy has been placed upon it, and surrounded by the banners and bannerols, is a striking and conspicuous object in the old abbey. It is supported by four great pillars, and rises in the centre in the shape of a dome."
It is here also worthy of note, that Horncastle Church affords a curious example of the principle of a double representation—one in life, and the other in death; before alluded to in the Italian monuments, and in that of Aylmer de Valence. On a mural brass (1519), Sir Lionel Dymock kneels in the act of prayer; and on another plate covering the grave below, the body is delineated wrapt in a shroud—beyond all controversy dead.
Mr. Markland, in his useful work, mentions "the steel-clad sires, and mothers mild reposing on their marble tombs;" and borrows from another archæologist an admirable description of the chapel of Edward the Confessor, who declares that "a more august spectacle can hardly be conceived, so many renowned sovereigns sleeping round the shrine of an older sovereign, the holiest of his line." It can only be the sleep of death, and this the sentiment conveyed: "These all died in faith." The subjects of this disquisition are not lounging in disrespectful supplication, nor wrapt in sleep enjoying pious dreams, nor stretched on a bed of mortal sickness: but the soul, having winged its way from sin and suffering, has left its tenement with the beams of hope yet lingering on the face, and the holy hands still refusing to relax their final effort. Impossible as this may seem to calculating minds, it is nevertheless one of the commonest of the authorised and customary modes designed to signify the faith, penitence, and peace attendant on a happy end.
C. T.
"ES TU SCOLARIS."
Allow me through your pages to ask some of your correspondents for information respecting an old and very curious book, which I picked up the other day. It is a thin unpaged octavo of twelve leaves, in black-letter type, without printer's name or date; but a pencil-note at the bottom of a quaint woodcut, representing a teacher and scholars, gives a date 1470! And in style of type, abbreviations, &c., it seems evidently of about the same age with another book which I bought at the same time, and which bears date as printed at "Padua, 1484."