so much of in death that it seemed better than life in all dignified
particulars, though I was then eagerly taking my chances of getting
along for a few centuries on earth.

I hope I am not being severe upon the verger, for he is a very necessary
evil, if evil at all, in a place of such manifold and recondite
interest; and in my next-to-last visit I found him most intelligibly
accessible to my curiosity concerning those waxen effigies of royalty
which used to be carried in the funeral processions of the English kings
and queens. He bade us wait till he had dismissed all his flock but
ourselves, and then, for a very little gratuitous money, he took us into
some upper places where, suddenly, we stood in the presence of Queen
Elizabeth and of William and Mary, as they had looked and dressed in
life, and very startlingly lifelike in the way they showed unconscious
of us. Doubtless there were others, but those are the ones I recall, and
with their identity I felt the power that glared from the fierce, vain,
shrewd, masterful face of Elizabeth, and the obstinate good sense and
ability that dwelt in William's. Possibly I read their natures into
them, but I do not think so; and one could well wish that art had so
preserved all the great embodiments of history.

I hope it was some better motive than the sightseer's that at least
partly caused me to make myself part of the congregation listening to a
sermon in the Abbey on the Sunday afternoon of my last visit. But the
stir of the place's literary associations began with the sight of
Longfellow's bust, which looks so much like him, in the grand simplicity
of his looks, as he was when he lived; and then presently the effigies
of all the "dear sons of memory" began to reveal themselves, medallion
and bust and figure, with many a remembered allegory and inscription. We
went and sat, for the choral service, under the bust of Macaulay, and,