In the centre of the chapel is the magnificent memorial of its founder, Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick in the time of Henry VI.  On a richly ornamented altar-tomb of gray marble lies the bronze figure of a knight in gilded armor, most admirably executed:  for the sculptors of those days had wonderful skill in their own style, and could make so life-like an image of a warrior, in brass or marble, that, if a trumpet were sounded over his tomb, you would expect him to start up and handle his sword.  The Earl whom we now speak of, however, has slept soundly in spite of a more serious disturbance than any blast of a trumpet, unless it were the final one.  Some centuries after his death, the floor of the chapel fell down and broke open the stone coffin in which he was buried; and among the fragments appeared the Earl of Warwick, with the color scarcely faded out of his checks, his eyes a little sunken, but in other respects looking as natural as if he had died yesterday.  But exposure to the atmosphere appeared to begin and finish the long-delayed process of decay in a moment, causing him to vanish like a bubble; so that, almost before there had been time to wonder at him, there was nothing left of the stalwart Earl save his hair.  This sole relic the ladies of Warwick made prize of, and braided it into rings and brooches for their own adornment; and thus, with a chapel and a ponderous tomb built on purpose to protect his remains, this great nobleman could not help being brought untimely to the light of day, nor even keep his love-locks on his skull after he had so long done with love.  There seems to be a fatality that disturbs people in their sepulchres, when they have been over-careful to render them magnificent and impregnable,—­as witness the builders of the Pyramids, and Hadrian, Augustus, and the Scipios, and most other personages whose mausoleums have been conspicuous enough to attract the violator; and as for dead men’s hair, I have seen a lock of King Edward the Fourth’s, of a reddish-brown color, which perhaps was once twisted round the delicate forefinger of Mistress Shore.

The direct lineage of the renowned characters that lie buried in this splendid chapel has long been extinct.  The earldom is now held by the Grevilles, descendants of the Lord Brooke who was slain in the Parliamentary War; and they have recently (that is to say, within a century) built a burial-vault on the other side of the church, calculated (as the sexton assured me, with a nod as if be were pleased) to afford suitable and respectful accommodation to as many as fourscore coffins.  Thank Heaven, the old man did not call them “CASKETS"!—­a vile modern phrase, which compels a person of sense and good taste to shrink more disgustfully than ever before from the idea of being buried at all.  But as regards those eighty coffins, only sixteen have as yet been contributed; and it may be a question with some minds, not merely whether the Grevilles will hold the earldom of Warwick