Admiral Coligny in Westminster Cathedral. . . .  I rose from my knees a new Luther, with something like a Protestant feeling, and scrutinised severely the tombs in Poets’ Corner.  Even there I found myself confronted with an almost irritating liberalism.  Here was Alexander Pope, who rejected all the overtures of Swift and Atterbury to embrace the Protestant faith.  And there was Dryden, not, perhaps, a great ornament to my persuasion, but still a Catholic at the last.  Dean Panther had not grudged poet Hind his niche in the National Valhalla (I knew I should be reduced to that periphrasis).  And here was the mighty Charles Darwin, about whose reception into the English Pantheon (I have fallen again) I remember there was some trouble.  Well, if precedent embalms a principle, I venture to raise a thin small voice, and plead for Herbert Spencer.  ‘The English people,’ said a friendly French critic, ’do not admire their great men because they were great, but because they reflect credit on themselves.’  So on the score of national vanity I claim space for Herbert Spencer.  Very few Englishmen have exercised such extraordinary influence on continental opinion, which Beaconsfield said was the verdict of posterity.  On the news of his death, the Italian Chamber passed a vote of condolence with the English people.  I suppose that does not seem a great honour to Englishmen, but to me, an enemy of United Italy, it seemed a great honour, not only to the dead but to the English people.  Can you imagine the Swiss Federal Council sending us a vote of condolence on the death of Mr. Hall Caine or Mr. Robert Hichens?

Again, though it is ungrateful of me to mention the fact after my experiences of October 13th, the Abbey was not built nor endowed by people who anticipated the Anglican form of worship being celebrated within its walls, though I admit it has been restored by the adherents of that communion.  The image of Milton, to take only one instance, would have been quite as objectionable to Henry III. or Abbot Islip as those of Darwin or Spencer.  The emoluments bequeathed by Henry VII. and others for requiem masses are now devoted to the education of Deans’ daughters and Canons’ sons.  Where incensed altars used to stand, hideous monuments of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries wound the Gothic air with their monstrous ornaments and inapposite epitaphs.  St. Paul’s may fairly be held sacred to Anglicanism, and I do not think any one would claim sepulture within its precincts for one who was avowedly hostile to Christian or Anglican sentiment.  But I think the Abbey has now passed into the category of museums, and might well be declared a national monument under control of the State.  The choir, and possibly the nave, should, of course, be severely preserved for whatever the State religion might be at the time.  Catholics need not mourn the secularisation of the transepts and chapels, because Leo XIII. renounced officially all claims on the ancient shrines of the Catholic faith, and High Churchmen might console themselves by recalling the fact that Abbots were originally laymen.