During the last years of his life, the monotony of his anguish was relieved by an occasional visit to the Old World.  It is interesting to note how thoroughly at home he felt himself among the English gentry, and how promptly they recognized him as a man and a brother.  He was, as we have remarked, more English than an Englishman; for England does advance, though slowly, from the insular to the universal.  Dining at a great house in London, one evening, he dwelt with pathetic eloquence upon the decline of Virginia.  Being asked what he thought was the reason of her decay, he startled and pleased the lords and ladies present by attributing it all to the repeal of the law of primogeniture.  One of the guests tells us that this was deemed “a strange remark from a Republican” and that, before the party broke up, the company had “almost taken him for an aristocrat.”  It happened sometimes, when he was conversing with English politicians, that it was the American who defended the English system against the attacks of Englishmen; and so full of British prejudice was he, that, in Paris, he protested that a decent dinner could not be bought for money.  Westminster Abbey woke all his veneration.  He went into it, one morning, just as service was about beginning, and took his place among the worshippers.  Those of our readers who have attended the morning service at an English cathedral on a week-day cannot have forgotten the ludicrous smallness of the congregation compared with the imposing array of official assistants.  A person who has a little tincture of the Yankee in him may even find himself wondering how it can “pay” the British empire to employ half a dozen reverend clergymen and a dozen robust singers to aid seven or eight unimportant members of the community in saying their prayers.  But John Randolph of Roanoke had not in him the least infusion of Yankee.  Standing erect in the almost vacant space, he uttered the responses in a tone that was in startling contrast to the low mumble of the clergyman’s voice, and that rose above the melodious amens of the choir.  He took it all in most serious earnest.  When the service was over, he said to his companion, after lamenting the hasty and careless manner in which the service had been performed, that he esteemed it an honor to have worshipped God in Westminster Abbey.  As he strolled among the tombs, he came, at last, to the grave of two men who had often roused his enthusiasm.  He stopped, and spoke: 

“I will not say, Take off your shoes, for the ground on which you stand is holy; but, look, sir, do you see those simple letters on the flagstones beneath your feet,—­W.P. and C.J.F.  Here lie, side by side, the remains of the two great rivals, Pitt and Fox, whose memory so completely lives in history.  No marble monuments are necessary to mark the spot where their bodies repose.  There is more simple grandeur in those few letters than in all the surrounding monuments, sir.”