Then they began to move round the short transept in which they found themselves—­a part of the Abbey reserved for the great statesmen.  Frank tried to quote the passage in which Macaulay talks about the men worn out by the stress and struggle of the neighbouring parliament-hall, and coming hither for peace and rest.  Here were the men who had been strong enough to grasp the helm, and who, sometimes wisely, sometimes foolishly, but always honestly, had tried to keep the old ship before the wind.  Canning and Peel were there, with Pitt, Fox, Grattan and Beaconsfield.  Governments and oppositions moulder behind the walls.  Beaconsfield alone among all the statues showed the hard-lined face of the self-made man.  These others look so plump and smooth one can hardly realise how strong they were, but they sprang from those ruling castes to whom strength came by easy inheritance.  Frank told Maude the little which he knew of each of them—­of Grattan, the noblest Irishman of them all, of Castlereagh, whose coffin was pursued to the gates of the Abbey by a raging mob who wished to tear out his corpse, of Fox the libertine philosopher, of Palmerston the gallant sportsman, who rode long after he could walk.  They marvelled together at the realism of the sculptor who had pitted Admiral Warren with the smallpox, and at the absurdity of that other one who had clad Robert Peel in a Roman toga.

Then turning to the right at the end of the Statesmen’s Transept, they wandered aimlessly down the huge nave.  It was overwhelming, the grandeur of the roof above and of the contents below.  Any one of hundreds of these tombs was worth a devout pilgrimage, but how could one raise his soul to the appreciation of them all.  Here was Darwin who revolutionised zoology, and here was Isaac Newton who gave a new direction to astronomy.  Here were old Ben Jonson, and Stephenson the father of railways, and Livingstone of Africa, and Wordsworth, and Kingsley, and Arnold.  Here were the soldiers of the mutiny—­Clyde and Outram and Lawrence,—­and painters, and authors, and surgeons, and all the good sons who in their several degrees had done loyal service to the old mother.  And when their service was done the old mother had stretched out that long arm of hers and had brought them home, and always for every good son brought home she had sent another forth, and her loins were ever fruitful, and her children loving and true.  Go into the Abbey and think, and as the nation’s past is borne in upon you, you will have no fear for its future.

Frank was delighted with some of the monuments and horrified by others, and he communicated both his joy and his anger to Maude.  They noticed together how the moderns and the Elizabethans had much in common in their types of face, their way of wearing the hair, and their taste in monuments, while between them lie the intolerable affectations—­which culminated towards the end of last century.

‘It all rings false—­statue, inscription, everything,’ said Frank.  ’These insufferable allegorical groups sprawling round a dead hero are of the same class as the pompous and turgid prose of Doctor Johnson.  The greatest effects are the simplest effects, and so it always was and so it always will be.  But that little bit of Latin is effective, I confess.’