The Monuments of the Nave and Transepts.
Remembering that "too many tombs will produce the same satiety as too many pictures," and determined not to fill our minds with "a hopeless jumble in which kings and statesmen, warriors, ecclesiastics and poets are tossing about together," we began at the Poet's Corner, as every one should do on his first visit, and, merely glancing at the monuments of subordinate interest, gave our time to those of the men with whose lives and works we had some acquaintance from our former reading, thus spending a whole morning in the two transepts and the nave. What a list of glorious names is afforded by even this meagre selection! Chaucer, Spencer, Browning, Tennyson, Shakespeare, Milton, Gray, Burns, Scott, Goldsmith, Coleridge, Southey (the last eight named being represented by monuments, but buried elsewhere); Thackeray, Addison, Macaulay, Garrick, Samuel Johnson (with his degree of LL. D. chiselled after his name in the unscholarly form of "L. L. D."—a thing which would have mortified him, and which one would not expect to find in Westminster Abbey), Charles Dickens; Dr. Busby (for fifty-five years head-master of Westminster School, celebrated for his extremely free use of the rod and for having persistently kept his hat on when Charles II. visited his school, saying that it would never do for the boys to think any one superior to himself);—all these and many more in or near the south transept; then in the nave, Major André (hanged by Washington as a spy), Lord Lawrence ("who feared man so little because he feared God so much"), David Livingstone, Charles Darwin, Sir Isaac Newton, Matthew Arnold, Charles Kingsley, Wordsworth, William Pitt, Charles James Fox, "Rare Ben Jonson"; then, in the north transept, Lord Mansfield, Warren Hastings, and others, among them the monument of the "Loyall Duke of Newcastle" (1676) and his literary wife, a most voluminous writer, who was in the habit of calling up her servants at all hours of the night to take down her thoughts, much to the disgust of her husband. When complimented on her learning, he said, "Sir, a very wise woman is a very foolish thing."
Pagan Sculptures in a Christian Church.
A great deal of bad taste has been displayed in the monuments of this transept. There is a colossal tomb by Nollekens, the worst but one in the Abbey, commemorating three sea captains. It represents Neptune reclining on the back of a sea-horse, and directing the attention of Britannia to the medallions of the dead, which hang from a rostral column surmounted by a figure of Victory. "Is that Christianity?" asked a visitor, pointing to Neptune and the trident. "Yes," wittily answered Dean Milman, "it is Tridentine Christianity"—a remark which has an exceedingly keen edge, though it may not be appreciated except by those who have some knowledge of the relation sustained by the Council of Trent to the beliefs and practices of the Romish Church. The sculptors were for a time "weighed down by the pagan mania for Neptunes, Britannias, and Victorys." Goldwin Smith says, "Some of the monuments might with advantage be removed from a Christian Church to a heathen Pantheon, while some might be better for being macadamized."
The Nightingale Monuments.
The most striking monument in the Abbey, though Walpole calls it "more theatrical than sepulchral," is that of Lady Elizabeth Nightingale. In the lower part of the sculpture a skeleton figure, Death, has broken through the iron doors of the grave, and, grasping the ledge above him with one bony hand, is in the act of hurling his dart with the other at the lady, who with her husband occupies the upper part of the sculpture, and who is represented as falling back into the arms of her horror-stricken husband, while he makes frantic but futile efforts to shield her from the stroke. Wesley said Mrs. Nightingale's tomb was the finest in the Abbey, as showing "common sense among heaps of unmeaning stone and marble"; but Washington Irving, while granting that the whole group is executed with terrible truth and spirit, says it appears to him horrible rather than sublime, and asks, "Why should we thus seek to clothe death with unnecessary terrors, and to spread horrors round the tomb of those we love? The grave should be surrounded by everything that might inspire tenderness and veneration for the dead; or that might win the living to virtue. It is the place, not of disgust and dismay, but of sorrow and meditation."
CHAPTER XX.
The Royal Chapels in Westminster Abbey.