The verger will show us the Royal tombs and the Royal waxworks, with the shrine of the Confessor, the armor of Henry V., and all the treasures that lie behind those iron gates. We can see for ourselves the monuments of the great unknown and the great illustrious who are buried in this cemetery. We can read in the historians of the Abbey about the tombs and the statues, the sculptors and the architects, the occupants and their royal achievements.
Let us turn to the men of Letters and of Art. Here lies Chaucer; buried in the church in the year 1400, not because he was a great poet, but because he was one of the Royal household. The monument was erected in the reign of Edward VI. Next to him lies Spenser, who died in King Street close by. All the poets were present at his funeral; elegies written by them for this occasion were thrown into the grave with the pens that wrote them. The Countess of Dorset erected the monument. Then come Drayton, Ben Jonson, Sir William Davenant, Abraham Cowley, John Dryden—whose monument was raised by Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham.
This Sheffield raised: the sacred dust below
Was Dryden’s once:—the rest who does not know?
But the lines were altered and Pope’s proposed epitaph did not appear. John Milton’s bust was put up in 1737; his ashes lie in St. Giles’ Cripplegate. Here are that remarkable pair Aphra Behn and Tom Brown. Here is Mrs. Steele, Dick Steele’s first wife, and here lies Addison, the writer who is perhaps more loved than any other in our whole literary history. They knew how to honor so great a scholar and an essayist in the year 1719. His body lay in state in the Jerusalem Chamber. They buried him in the dead of night—funerals in the eighteenth century were often held at midnight when the darkness and the gleaming torches added to the impressiveness of the ceremony. Bishop Atterbury met the corpse; the choir sang a hymn, and the procession was conducted by torchlight round the Royal Tombs into Henry VII.’s Chapel. Tickell has written upon the scene:
Can I forget the dismal night that gave
My soul’s best part for ever to the grave?
How silent did his old companions tread
By midnight lamps the mansions of the dead;
Through breaking statues, these unheeded things,
Through rows of warriors and through walks of kings!
What awe did the slow solemn knell inspire,
The pealing organ and the pausing choir:
The duties by the lawn-robed prelate pay’d:
And the last words that dust to dust conveyed!
Matthew Prior and Gay followed Addison. Pope was buried at Twickenham; Gray at Stoke Pogis; Goldsmith in the Temple. Samuel Johnson lies in the Abbey; Sheridan, Cumberland, and Macpherson are buried here. And here of moderns are Macaulay, Lord Lytton, Dickens, and Tennyson. Of actors and actresses Anne Oldfield, Anna Bracegirdle, Betterton, Garrick, and John Henderson are buried here. Of musicians Purcell, John Blow, William Croft, Charles Burney, Sterndale Bennett, and Händel are buried here. Of painters there are none. This is a very remarkable omission. How did it happen? Presumably because the successive Deans and Canons have had no taste for art.
The list includes a goodly company. Whenever a great man dies, the Dean should remove a monument—one of the unknown—to make room for the newcomer; in that way the Abbey would become more and more the Holy Field of the British Empire.
One thing more before we leave the Abbey. We read of the mediæval churches, especially such churches as old St. Paul’s, the Gray Friars, and Austin Friars, how they were filled from end to end with tombs of princes and noble ladies, carved and precious, with alabaster and marble; how between and among the greater tombs were the tombs of the lesser folk—but all of them, nobles and ladies and knights—the common sort lay outside—insomuch that the church was filled with their monuments. If we go into Westminster Abbey, alone of existing churches we can understand this wealth of sepulchral monuments formerly so common.
What says Addison?
“When I am in a serious humour I very often walk by myself in Westminster Abbey. When the gloominess of the place, and the use to which it is applied, with the solemnity of the building and the conditions of the people who lie in it, are apt to fill the mind with a kind of melancholy or rather thoughtfulness that is not disagreeable.... When I look upon the tombs of the great, every emotion of envy dies in me; when I read the epitaphs of the beautiful, every inordinate desire goes out; when I meet with the grief of parents upon a tombstone, my heart melts with compassion; when I see the tombs of the parents themselves I consider the vanity of grieving for those whom we must quickly follow; when I see kings lying by those who deposed them, when I consider rival wits placed side by side, or the holy men who divided the world with their contests and disputes, I reflect with sorrow and astonishment on the little competitions, factions, and debates of mankind.”