How calmly they sleep—those warriors who once filled the world with the tumult of their deeds! If you go into St. Mary's, in the Temple, you will stand above the dust of the Crusaders and see the beautiful copper effigies of them, recumbent on the marble pavement, and feel and know, as perhaps you never did before, the calm that follows the tempest. St. Mary's was built in 1240 and restored in 1828. It would be difficult to find a lovelier specimen of Norman architecture—at once massive and airy, perfectly simple, yet rich with beauty, in every line and scroll.
There is only one other church in Great Britain, it is said, which has, like this, a circular vestibule. The stained glass windows, both here and at St. Helen's, are very glorious. The organ at St. Mary's was selected by Jeffreys, afterwards infamous as the wicked judge. The pilgrim who pauses to muse at the grave of Goldsmith may often hear its solemn, mournful tones. I heard them thus, and was thinking of Dr. Johnson's tender words, when he first learned that Goldsmith was dead: "Poor Goldy was wild—very wild—but he is so no more." The room in which he died, a heart-broken man at only forty-six, was but a little way from the spot where he sleeps.† The noises of Fleet Street are heard there only as a distant murmur. But birds chirp over him, and leaves flutter down upon his tomb, and every breeze that sighs around the gray turrets of the ancient Temple breathes out his requiem.
† No. 2 Brick Court, Middle Temple.—In 1757-58 Goldsmith was employed by a chemist, near Fish Street Hill. When he wrote his Inquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe he was living in Green Arbour Court, "over Break-neck Steps." At a lodging in Wine Office Court, Fleet Street, he wrote The Vicar of Wakefield. Afterwards he had lodgings at Canonbury House, Islington, and in 1764, in the Library Staircase of the Inner Temple.
