our eyes,—­for she was the mother of Lady Jane Grey, and died three hundred years ago,—­but see those two little stone heads lying on their stone pillow, just beyond the marble Duchess.  They are children of Edward III.,—­the Black Prince’s baby-brothers.  They died five hundred years ago,—­but what are centuries in Westminster Abbey?  Under this pillared canopy, her head raised on two stone cushions, her fair, still features bordered with the spreading cap we know so well in her portraits, lies Mary of Scotland.  These fresh monuments, protected from the wear of the elements, seem to make twenty generations our contemporaries.  Look at this husband warding off the dart which the grim, draped skeleton is aiming at the breast of his fainting wife.  Most famous, perhaps, of all the statues in the Abbey is this of Joseph Gascoigne Nightingale and his Lady, by Roubilliac.  You need not cross the ocean to see it.  It is here, literally to every dimple in the back of the falling hand, and every crinkle of the vermiculated stone-work.  What a curious pleasure it is to puzzle out the inscriptions on the monuments in the background!—­for the beauty of your photograph is, that you may work out minute derails with the microscope, just as you can with the telescope in a distant landscape in Nature.  There is a lady, for instance, leaning upon an urn,—­suggestive, a little, of Morgiana and the forty thieves.  Above is a medallion of one wearing a full periwig.  Now for a half-inch lens to make out the specks that seem to be letters.  “Erected to the Memory of William Pulteney, Earl of Bath, by his Brother”—­That will do,—­the inscription operates as a cold bath to enthusiasm.  But here is our own personal namesake, the once famous Rear Admiral of the White, whose biography we can find nowhere except in the “Gentleman’s Magazine,” where he divides the glory of the capture of Quebec with General Wolfe.  A handsome young man with hyacinthine locks, his arms bare and one hand resting on a cannon.  We remember thinking our namesake’s statue one of the most graceful in the Abbey, and have always fallen back on the memory of that and of Dryden’s Achates of the “Annus Mirabilis,” as trophies of the family.

Enough of these marbles; there is no end to them; the walls and floor of the great, many-arched, thousand-pillared, sky-lifted cavern are crusted all over with them, like stalactites and stalagmites.  The vast temple is alive with the images of the dead.  Kings and queens, nobles, statesmen, soldiers, admirals, the great men whose deeds we all know, the great writers whose words are in all our memories, the brave and the beautiful whose fame has shrunk into their epitaphs, are all around us.  What is the cry for alms that meets us at the door of the church to the mute petition of these marble beggars, who ask to warm their cold memories for a moment in our living hearts?  Look up at the mighty arches overhead, borne up on tall clustered columns,—­as if that avenue of