entered just in time to be turned out with half a score of other tardy
visitors who had come at the closing hour. After this unavailing visit,
the necessity of going again established itself in me, and I went
repeatedly, choosing, indeed, rainy days when I could not well go
elsewhere, and vengefully rejoicing, when I went, in the inadequacy of
its hugeness and the ugliness of its monuments.

Some sense of my mood I may impart, if I say that St. Paul's always
seemed a dispersed and interrupted St. Peter's in its structure and
decoration, and a very hard, unsympathetic, unappealing Westminster
Abbey in its mortuary records. The monuments of the Abbey are often
grotesque enough, but where they are so they are in the taste of times
far enough back to have become rococo and charming. I do not mind a
bronze Death starting out of a marble tomb and threatening me with his
dart, if he is a Death of the seventeenth century; but I do very much
mind the heavy presence of the Fames or Britannias of the earlier
nineteenth century celebrating in dull allegory the national bereavement
in the loss of military and naval heroes who fell when the national type
was least able to inspire grief with an artistic expression. The
statesmen, the ecclesiastics, the jurists, look all of a like period,
and stand about in stone with no more interest for the spectator than
the Fames or the Britannias.

The imagination stirs at nothing in St. Paul's so much as at that list
of London bishops, which, if you are so lucky as to come on it by chance
where it is inscribed beside certain windows, thrills you with a sense
of the long, long youth of that still unaging England. Bishops of the
Roman and Briton times, with their scholarly Latin names; bishops of the
Saxon and Danish times remembered in rough, Northern syllables; bishops
of the Norman time, with appellations that again flow upon the tongue;