basin and a bracket for the statue of St. Erasmus (a Bishop of Campania martyred under Diocletian), with the rays which once surrounded the head of the figure still remaining on the wall. Near the entrance is the little monument of Jane, wife of Sir Clippesly Crewe (1639), with a curious relief representing her death.

Through this shrine we enter the Chapel of St. John Baptist, of which the screen is formed by tombs of bishops and abbots. In the centre is the tomb of

Thomas Cecil, Earl of Exeter (1622), eldest son of Lord Burleigh, and his first wife Dorothy Nevile. The vacant space on the earl's left side was intended for his second wife, Frances Brydges, but she indignantly refused to allow her effigy to lie on the left side, though she is buried with her husband.

Making the circuit of the chapel from the right, we see the monuments of

Mrs. Mary Kendall (1709-10), who "desired that her ashes might not be divided in death from those of her friend Lady Catharine Jones.*

George Fascet, Abbot of Westminster (1500), an altar-tomb with a stone canopy. On it rests the stone coffin of Abbot Thomas Millyng, (1474), godfather of Edward V., who was made Bishop of Hereford by Edward IV. in reward for the services he had rendered to Elizabeth Woodville when she was in sanctuary at Westminster. His coffin was probably removed from the centre of the chapel when the tomb of the Earl of Exeter was placed there.

Thomas Ruthall, Bishop of Durham (1522), who died at Durham Place in the Strand, from grief at having sent the inventory of all his great riches to Henry VIII. in mistake for the "Breviate of the State of the Land," which he had been commissioned to draw up. He had been Secretary to Henry VII., and had made a good use of his immense wealth, having paid a third of the expense of building the great bridge of Newcastle-on-Tyne. The tomb once had a canopy.

•The charitable daughter of the Earl of Ranelagh, who built a school at Chelsea for the education of the daughters of the Poor Chelsea Pensioners.

Abbot William of Colchester (1420), who conspired, with the earls and dukes imprisoned in the abbot's house by Henry IV., in favour of the dethroned monarch, and swore to be faithful to death to King Richard. The effigy is robed in rich vestments: there are two angels at the pillow, and a spaniel lies at the feet.

(On the site of the altar) Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon (1596), the first-cousin t and most faithful friend and chamberlain of Queen Elizabeth. He is said to have died of disappointment at the long delay in his elevation. The queen visited him on his death-bed, and commanded the robes and patent of an earl to be placed before him. "It is too late," he said, and declined the offered dignity. The Corinthian tomb of alabaster and marble, erected by his son, is one of the loftiest in England (36 feet).

Thomas Carey (1649), second son of the Earl of Monmouth, a Gentleman of the Bedchamber to Charles I., who died of grief for the execution of his master. By this monument may be seen remains of the ancient lockers for the sacred vestments and plate.

*(Beneath) Hugh and Mary Bohun, children of Humphrey Bohun, Earl of Hereford, and the Princess Isabella, sixth daughter of Edward I. A grey marble monument close to the wall, removed by Richard II. from the Chapel of the Confessor to make room for Anne of Bohemia.

Colonel Edward Popham (1651), and Anne his wife. As he was a general in the Parliamentary army, his body was removed at the Restoration, but the monument was allowed to remain, on condition of the inscription being turned to the wall.

Sir Thomas Vaughan, Treasurer to Edward IV. The tomb has a beautiful but mutilated brass. Under the canopy is preserved a fragment of the canopy of Bishop Ruthall's tomb.

The banners which still wave in this chapel are those carried at the funerals of those members of the ancient Northumbrian family of Delaval who are buried beneath - Susannah, Lady Delaval, 1783; Sarah Hussey, Countess of Tyrconnel, 1800; John Hussey, Lord Delaval, 1806.

Opposite the Chapel of St. John is the staircase by which visitors usually ascend to the centre of interest in the Abbey

See Shakspeare's Richard II.

↑ Being son of Mary Boleyn, who married William Carey, a penniless but nobly born squire, without her father's consent,

-one may say in England-the Chapel of St. Edward the

Confessor.

"Mortality, behold, and feare,

What a change of flesh is here!
Think how many royall bones
Sleep within these heaps of stones;
Here they lye, had realmes, had lands,
Who now want strength to stir their hands;
Where from their pulpits seal'd with dust,
They preach, 'In greatnesse is no trust.'

Here's an acre sown indeed,
With the richest, royall'st seed,

That the earth did ere suck in,

Since the first man died for sin :

Here the bones of birth have cry'd,

Though gods they were, as men they dy'd:'

Here all souls, ignoble things,

Dropt from the ruin'd sides of kings.

Here's a world of pomp and state

Buried in dust, once dead by fate."

Francis Beaumont, 1586–1616.

"A man may read a sermon, the best and most passionate that ever man preached, if he shall but enter into the sepulchres of kings. . . . Where our kings have been crowned, their ancestors lie interred, and they must walk over their grandsire's head to take his crown. There is an acre sown with royal seed, the copy of the greatest change, from rich to naked, from ceiled roofs to arched coffins, from living like gods to die like men. There is enough to cool the flames of lust, to abate the heights of pride, to appease the itch of covetous desires, to sully and dash out the dissembling colours of a lustful, artificial, and imaginary beauty. There the warlike and the peaceful, the fortunate and the miserable, the beloved and the despised princes mingle their dust, and pay down their symbol of mortality, and tell all the world, that, when we die, our ashes shall be equal to kings', and our accounts easier, and our pains or our crowns shall be less."—Jeremy Taylor's Holy Dying, ch. i. sec. II.

This chapel, more than any other part of the Abbey, remains as it was left by its second founder, Henry III. He made it a Holy of Holies to contain the shrine of his

sainted predecessor. For this he moved the high altar westward, and made the choir project far down into the nave, like the coro of a Spanish cathedral; for this he raised behind the high altar a mound of earth, "the last funeral tumulus in England." For this he imported from Rome "Peter, the Roman citizen" (absurdly supposed by Walpole and Virtue to be the famous mosaicist Pietro Cavallini, who was not born till 1279, six years after the date of the shrine), who has left us the pavement glowing with peacock hues of Opus Alexandrinum, which recalls the pavements of the Roman basilicas, and the twisted. pillars of the shrine itself, which are like those of the cloisters in S. Paolo and S. Giovanni Laterano.

Edward the Confessor died in the opening days of 1066, when his church at Westminster had just been consecrated in the presence of Edith his queen. He was buried before the high altar with his crown upon his head, a golden chain and crucifix around his neck, and his pilgrim's ring upon his finger. Thus he was seen when his coffin was opened by Henry I. in the presence of Bishop Gundulf, who tried to steal a hair from his white beard. Thus he was again seen by Henry II., in whose reign he was transferred by Archbishop Becket to a new and "precious feretry," just after his canonization (Feb. 7, 1161) by Pope Alexander III., who enjoined "that his body be honoured here on earth, as his soul is glorified in heaven." Henry III. also looked upon the "incorrupt" body, before its translation to its present resting-place, on the shoulders of the royal Plantagenet princes, whose own sepulchres were afterwards to gather around it. The body lies in a stone coffin, iron-bound, within the shrine of marble and mosaic. It appears from

Henry VII.'s Chapel destroyed at the Reformation were used in her vault. At her funeral "all the people plucked down the hangings and the armorial bearings round about the abbey, and every one tore him a piece as large as he could catch it." James I. wrote the striking inscription upon the monument-"Regno consortes et urnâ, hic obdormimus Elizabetha et Maria sorores, in spe resurrectionis." those words," says Dean Stanley, "the long war of the English Reformation is closed."

"In

The eastern end of this aisle has been called the Innocents' Corner. In its centre is the tomb erected in 1674 by Charles II. over the bones found at the foot of the staircase in the Tower, supposed to be those of the murdered boys, Edward V. and Richard, Duke of York.

On the left is Princess Mary, third daughter of James I. (1607), who died at two years old, about whom her Protestant father was wont to say that he "would not pray to the Virgin Mary, but for the Virgin Mary."* Her epitaph tells how she, "received into heaven in early infancy," found joy for herself, but "left longings" to her parents. Such was the manner of her death, as bred a kind of admiration in us all that were present to behold it. For whereas the new-tuned organs of speech, by reason of her great and wearisome sickness, had been so greatly weakened, that for the space of twelve or fourteen hours at least, there was no sound of any word breaking from her lips; yet when it sensibly appeared that she would soon make a peaceable end of a troublesome life, she sighed out these words, 'I go, I go,' and when, not long after, there was something to be ministered unto her by those that attended her in the time of her sickness, fastening her eye upon them with a constant look, she repeated, 'Away, I go!' And yet a third time, almost immediately before she offered herself, a sweet virgin sacrifice, unto Him that made her, faintly cried, I go, I go.'. . . And whereas she had used many other words in the time of her extremity, yet now, at the last, she did aptly utter these, and none but these.”—Funeral Sermon for the Princess Mary, by J. Leech, preached in Henry VII.'s Chapel, Sept. 23, 1607.

*On the right is Princess Sophia (1606), fourth daughter of James I., who died at Greenwich three days after her birth. It is a charming little monument of an infant in her cradle-" a royal rose-bud, plucked by premature fate, and snatched away from her parents, that she might flourish again in the rosary of Christ."

"This royal babe is represented sleeping in her cradle, wherewith

I uller's "Worthies," i. 490.