In this church are buried, among generations of their nobles and courtiers, fourteen monarchs of England—beginning with the Saxon Sebert and ending with George the Second. Fourteen queens rest here, and many children of the royal blood who never came to the throne. Here, confronted in a haughty rivalry of solemn pomp, rise the equal tombs of Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart. Queen Eleanor's dust is here, and here, too, is the dust of the grim Queen Mary. In one little chapel you may pace, with but half a dozen steps, across the graves of Charles the Second, William and Mary, and Queen Anne and her consort Prince George. At the tomb of Henry the Fifth you may see the helmet, shield, and saddle that were worn by the valiant young king at Agincourt; and close by—on the tomb of Margaret Woodeville, daughter of Edward the Fourth—the sword and shield that were borne, in royal state, before the great Edward the Third, five hundred years ago. The princes who are said to have been murdered in the Tower are commemorated here by an altar, set up by Charles the Second, whereon the inscription—blandly and almost humorously oblivious of the incident of Cromwell—states that it was erected in the thirtieth year of Charles's reign. Richard the Second, deposed and assassinated, is here entombed; and within a few feet of him are the relics of his uncle, the able and powerful Duke of Gloster, treacherously ensnared and betrayed to death. Here also, huge, rough, and gray, is the stone sarcophagus of Edward the First, which, when opened, in 1771, disclosed the skeleton of departed majesty, still perfect, wearing robes of gold tissue and crimson velvet, and having a crown on the head and a sceptre in the hand. So sleep, in jewelled darkness and gaudy decay, what once were monarchs! And all around are great lords, holy prelates, famous statesmen, renowned soldiers, and illustrious poets. Burleigh, Pitt, Fox, Burke, Canning, Newton, Barrow, Wilberforce—names forever glorious!—are here enshrined in the grandest sepulchre on earth.
The interments that have been effected in and around the Abbey since the remote age of Edward the Confessor must number thousands; but only about six hundred are named in the guide-books. In the south transept, which is Poets' Corner, rest Chaucer, Spenser, Drayton, Cowley, Dryden, Beaumont, Davenant, Prior, Gay, Congreve, Rowe, Dr. Johnson, Campbell, Macaulay, and Dickens. Memorials to many other poets and writers have been ranged on the adjacent walls and pillars; but these are among the authors that were actually buried in this place. Ben Jonson is not here, but—in an upright posture, it is said—under the north aisle of the Abbey; Addison is in the chapel of Henry the Seventh, at the foot of the monument of Charles Montague, the great Earl of Halifax; and Bulwer is in the chapel of St. Edmund. Garrick, Sheridan, Henderson, Cumberland, Handel, Parr, Sir Archibald Campbell, and the once so mighty Duke of Argyle are almost side by side; while in St. Edward's chapel sleep Anne of Cleves, the divorced wife of Henry the Eighth, and Anne Neville, queen of Richard the Third.
Betterton and Spranger Barry are in the cloisters—where may be read, in four little words, the most touching epitaph in the Abbey: "Jane Lister—dear child." There are no monuments to either Byron, Shelley, Swift, Pope, Bolingbroke, Keats, Cowper, Moore, or Young; but Mason and Shadwell are commemorated; and Barton Booth is splendidly inurned; while hard by, in the cloisters, a place was found for Mrs. Cibber, Tom Brown, Anne Bracegirdle, Anne Oldfield, and Aphra Behn. The destinies have not always been stringently fastidious as to the admission of lodgers to this sacred ground. The pilgrim is startled by some of the names that he finds in Westminster Abbey, and pained by reflection on the absence of some that he will seek in vain. Yet he will not fail to moralise, as he strolls in Poets' Corner, upon the inexorable justice with which time repudiates fictitious reputations and twines the laurel on only the worthiest brows. In well-nigh five hundred years of English literature there have lived only about a hundred and ten poets whose names survive in any needed chronicle; and not all of those possess life outside of the library. To muse over the literary memorials in the Abbey is also to think upon the seeming caprice of chance with which the graves of the British poets have been scattered far and wide throughout the land.
Gower, Fletcher, and Massinger (to name but a few of them) rest in Southwark; Sydney and Donne in St. Paul's cathedral; More (his head, that is, while his body moulders in the Tower chapel) at Canterbury; Drummond in Lasswade church; Dorset at Withyham, in Sussex; Waller at Beaconsfield; Wither, unmarked, in the church of the Savoy; Milton in the church of the Cripplegate—where his relics, it is said, were despoiled; Swift at Dublin, in St. Patrick's cathedral; Young at Welwyn; Pope at Twickenham; Thomson at Richmond; Gray at Stoke-Pogis; Watts in Bunhill-Fields; Collins in an obscure little church at Chichester—though his name is commemorated by a tablet in Chichester cathedral; Cowper in Dereham church; Goldsmith in the garden of the Temple; Savage at Bristol; Burns at Dumfries; Rogers at Hornsey; Crabbe at Trowbridge; Scott in Dryburgh abbey; Coleridge at Highgate; Byron in Hucknall church, near Nottingham; Moore at Bromham; Montgomery at Sheffield; Heber at Calcutta; Southey in Crossthwaite churchyard, near Keswick; Wordsworth and Hartley Coleridge side by side in the churchyard of Grasmere; and Clough at Florence—whose lovely words may here speak for all of them—
"One port, methought, alike they sought,
One purpose held, where'er they fare:
O bounding breeze, O rushing seas.
At last, at last, unite them there!"