all faded,” and so on for several long lines in very big letters, occupying a good deal of space on the wall.  But what and who was he, and what connection had he with Bath?  He was a young man born in the West Indies who died in Scotland, and later his mother, coming to Bath for her health, “caused this inscription to be placed on the abbey walls”!  If this policy or tradition is still followed by the abbey authorities, it will be necessary for them to build an annexe; if it be no longer followed, would it be going too far to suggest that these mural tablets to a thousand obscurities, which ought never to have been placed there, should now be removed and placed in some vault where the relations or descendants of the persons described could find, and if they wished it, have them removed?

But it must be said that the abbey is not without a fair number of memorials with which no one can quarrel; the one I admire most, to Quin, the actor, has, I think, the best or the most appropriate epitaph ever written.  No, one, however familiar with the words, will find fault with me for quoting them here: 

   That tongue which set the table on a roar
   And charmed the public ear is heard no more. 
   Closed are those eyes, the harbingers of wit,
   Which spake before the tongue what Shakespeare writ. 
   Cold is that hand which living was stretched forth
   At friendship’s call to succor modest worth. 
   Here lies James Quin, deign readers to be taught
   Whate’er thy strength of body, force of thought,
   In Nature’s happiest mood however cast,
   To this complexion thou must come at last.

Quin’s monument strikes one as the greatest there because of Garrick’s living words, but there is another very much more beautiful.

I first noticed this memorial on the wall at a distance of about three yards, too far to read anything in the inscription except the name of Sibthorpe, which was strange to me, but instead of going nearer to read it I remained standing to admire it at that distance.  The tablet was of white marble, and on it was sculptured the figure of a young man with curly head and classic profile.  He was wearing sandals and a loose mantle held to his breast with one hand, while in the other hand he carried a bunch of leaves and flowers.  He appeared in the act of stepping ashore from a boat of antique shape, and the artist had been singularly successful in producing the idea of free and vigorous motion in the figure as well as of some absorbing object in his mind.  The figure was undoubtedly symbolical, and I began to amuse myself by trying to guess its meaning.  Then a curious thing happened.  A person who had been moving slowly along near me, apparently looking with no great interest at the memorials, came past me and glanced first at the tablet I was looking at, then at me.  As our eyes met I remarked that I was admiring the best memorial I had found in the abbey, and then added, “I’ve been trying to make out its meaning.  You see the man is a traveller and is stepping ashore with a flowering spray in his hand.  It strikes me that it may have been erected to the memory of a person who introduced some valuable plant into England.”