Coronation and burial! Here the nominal kings are crowned. Here they and the real kings—those who by their genius and character really rule the race—are buried.
The Stone of Scone.
In the chapel of Edward the Confessor stands a scratched and battered wooden chair, six hundred years old, beneath the seat of which is inserted a thick, flat block of reddish sandstone. This is the celebrated Stone of Destiny, about the adventures and travels of which so many incredible stories have been told, from the time of its alleged use by the patriarch Jacob as a pillar at Bethel, till the time of its arrival at Scone, near Perth, in Scotland. It is certain that from the middle of the twelfth century all the Scottish kings were crowned on this stone, till it was captured and carried to London by Edward I., and that in the oak chair beneath which the stone was then enclosed all the kings of England since the time of Edward I. have been crowned, the last being Edward VII., on the 9th of last August. It has never been carried out of the church but once. That was when it was taken to Westminster Hall, across the street, that in it Oliver Cromwell might be installed Lord Protector. Thus it was that "the greatest prince that ever ruled England," as Lord Macaulay rightly calls him, the man who refused to wear the crown, but who wielded so much more of real power than any of those who did wear it that he placed England in the forefront of European nations and made her mistress of the seas, was not inducted into his office in the Abbey, where all the other sovereigns have been crowned since William I., but in Westminster Hall, which is also a place of extraordinary historical interest. The chair which holds the Stone of Scone, and the mate to it, made later and used for the queen consort, are, of course, covered with rich upholstering at the coronations, and much of the defacement of them is the result of driving nails into the wood for this purpose.
Whither the Paths of Glory Lead.
But the main attraction of Westminster Abbey is neither its architectural glory nor its connection with the crowning of the nation's sovereigns, but the fact that it is the chief sepulchre of Britain's great men. Not only is the building "paved with princes and a royal race," their memory a mingling of grandeur and of shame, but the uncrowned glories of the nation, the true and pure and gifted, lie there as well under our feet, or are commemorated in stone before our eyes. Some English sovereigns are buried elsewhere, as Charles I. at Windsor, and Victoria at Frogmore; some preëminent men of action also, as Nelson and Wellington at St. Paul's Cathedral; some authors, too, of the first order of genius, as Shakespeare at Stratford, Milton at St. Giles, and Goldsmith in the Temple yard at London; and so on, but nowhere else on earth have the ashes of so many great men been brought together as in Westminster Abbey. Moreover, to many who are buried elsewhere monuments have been erected in the Abbey; for instance, to the three poets who have just been mentioned. That of Shakespeare is a marble figure holding a scroll on which are inscribed these lines from the Tempest, peculiarly appropriate in the building where so much greatness is buried:
"The Cloud capt Towers,
The Gorgeous Palaces,
The Solemn Temples,