I haunted the abbey, and the more I saw of it the more I loved it.  The impression it had made on me during my former visits had faded, or else I had never properly seen it, or had not seen it in the right emotional mood.  Now I began to think it the best of all the great abbey churches of England and the equal of the cathedrals in its effect on the mind.  How rich the interior is in its atmosphere of tempered light or tender gloom!  How tall and graceful the columns holding up the high roof of white stone with its marvellous palm-leaf sculpture!  What a vast expanse of beautifully stained glass!  I certainly gave myself plenty of time to appreciate it on this occasion, as I visited it every day, sometimes two or three times, and not infrequently I sat there for an hour at a stretch.

Sitting there one day, thinking of nothing, I was gradually awakened to a feeling almost of astonishment at the sight of the extraordinary number of memorial tablets of every imaginable shape and size which crowd the walls.  So numerous are they and so closely placed that you could not find space anywhere to put your hand against the wall.  We are accustomed to think that in cathedrals and other great ecclesiastical buildings the illustrious dead receive burial, and their names and claims on our gratitude and reverence are recorded, but in no fane in the land is there so numerous a gathering of the dead as in this place.  The inscription-covered walls were like the pages of an old black-letter volume without margins.  Yet when I came to think of it I could not recall any Bath celebrity or great person associated with Bath except Beau Nash, who was not perhaps a very great person.  Probably Carlyle would have described him as a “meeserable creature.”

Leaving my seat I began to examine the inscriptions, and found that they had not been placed there in memory of men belonging to Bath or even Somerset.  These monuments were erected to persons from all counties in the three kingdoms, and from all the big towns, those to Londoners being most numerous.  Nor were they of persons distinguished in any way.  Here you find John or Henry or Thomas Smith, or Brown, or Jones, or Robinson, provision dealer, or merchant, of Clerkenwell, or Bermondsey, or Bishopsgate Street Within or Without; also many retired captains, majors, and colonels.  There were hundreds more whose professions or occupations in life were not stated.  There were also hundreds of memorials to ladies—­widows and spinsters.  They were all, in fact, to persons who had come to die in Bath after “taking the waters,” and dying, they or their friends had purchased immortality on the walls of the abbey with a handful or two of gold.  Here is one of several inscriptions of the kind I took the trouble to copy:  “His early virtues, his cultivated talents, his serious piety, inexpressibly endeared him to his friends and opened to them many bright prospects of excellence and happiness.  These prospects have