It was a comfort as I came out of the Albert Memorial Chapel, and
rejoined nature upon the Terrace, to mutter to myself those fine lines
which not a hundred years ago everybody knew by heart: "The boast of
heraldry, the pomp of power, And all that beauty, all that wealth ere
gave, Await alike th' inevitable hour. The paths of glory lead but to
the grave,"--a verse which I found it not bad to remember as in the
Chapel Royal I gazed upon the helmets, and banners, and insignia of many
a defunct Knight of the Garter. I wondered if posterity would care much
for George the Fourth, or Third, or Second, or First, whose portraits I
had just been gazing at; I was sure that a good many would remember the
recluse scholar of Pembroke Hall, the Cambridge Professor of Modern
History, who cared for nothing but ancient history; who projected twenty
great poems, and finished only one or two; who spent his life in
commenting upon Plato and studying botany, and in writing letters to his
friend Mason; and who with a real touch of Pindar in his nature, was
content to fiddle-faddle away his life. He died at last of a most
unpoetical gout in the stomach, leaving behind him a cartload of
memoranda, and fifty fragments of fine things; and yet I, a stranger
from a far distant shore, was about to make a little pilgrimage to his
tomb, and all for the sake of that "Elegy Written in a Country
Churchyard," which has so held its own while a hundred bulkier things
have been forgotten.

The church itself is an interesting but not remarkable edifice, old,
small, and solidly built in a style common enough in England. Nothing,
however, could be more in keeping with the associations of the scene.
The very humility of the edifice has a property of its own, for anything
more magnificent would jar upon the feelings, as the monument in the
Park does most decidedly. It was Gray's wish that he might be buried
here, near the mother whom he loved so well; otherwise he could hardly