the monument to him at the west end of the church, com- All is hush'd and still as death.-'Tis dreadful! He who reads these lines enjoys for a moment the powers of a poet; he feels what he remembers to have felt before; but he feels it with great increase of sensibility: he recognises a familiar image, but meets it again amplified and expanded, embellished with beauty, and enlarged with majesty.2 We return to the South Transept. Matthew Prior claimed a place there, as well by his clever and agreeable verses, as by his diplomatic career and his connection with West- Matthew minster School. The monument, as a last piece of Prior, buried 'human vanity,' was provided by his son: the bust 1721. was a present from Louis XIV., whom he had known on his 1 Congreve himself judged more wisely. I wish to be visited on no 'other footing than as a gentleman who leads a life of plainness and simplicity.' Such is his appearance on Sept. 25, his monument. (See the whole story discussed in Thackeray's Humourists, p. 78; see also pp. 61, 80.) 2 Johnson, ii. 197, 198. embassy to Paris, and may serve to remind us of his rebuke to the Great Monarch when he replied at Versailles, I represent a king who not only fights battles, but wins them.' The inscription was by Dr. Freind, Head Master of Westminster, in 'honour of one who had done so great honour to the school.'' I had not strength enough [writes Atterbury] to attend Mr. Prior to his grave, else I would have done it, to have shown his friends that I had forgot and forgiven what he wrote to me. He is buried, as he desired, at the feet of Spenser, and I will take care to make good in every respect what I said to him when living; particularly as to the triplet he wrote for his own epitaph; which, while we were in good terms, I promised him should never appear on his tomb while I was Dean of Westminster.2 John Gay, died Dec. 4, 1732. 46 Ten years afterwards another blow fell on the literary circle. Gay's Fables,' written for the education of the Duke of Cumberland, still attract English children to his monument. But his playful, amiable character can only be appreciated by reading the letters of his contemporaries.3 'We have all had,' writes Dr. Arbuthnot, another loss, of our 'worthy and dear friend Dr. Gay. It was some alleviation of 'my grief to see him so universally lamented by almost everybody, even by those who only knew him by reputation. He 'was interred at Westminster Abbey, as if he had been a peer ' of the realm; and the good Duke of Queensberry, who lamented him as a brother, will set up a handsome monument upon His funeral, him.' His body was brought by the Company of 1732. Upholders from the Duke of Queensberry's to Exeter Change, and thence to the Abbey, at eight o'clock in the winter evening. Lord Chesterfield and Pope were present amongst the mourners.5 He had already, two months before Dec. 23, his death, desired My dear Mr Pope, whom I love as my own soul, if you survive me, as you certainly will, if a stone shall mark the place of my grave, see these words put upon it— Life is a jest, and all things show it; with what else you may think Biog. Brit. v. 3445. 2 Pope, x. 382.-The triplet was: To me 'tis given to die-to you 'tis given To live: alas! one moment sets us evenMark how impartial is the will of Heaven. 3 Good God! how often we are to die before we go quite off this stage! His wish was complied with.' The conclusion specially points to his place of burial: These are thy honours! not that here thy bust This last line, which was altered at the suggestion of Swift, is so dark that few understand it, and so harsh when it is ' explained that still fewer approve it.' 3 Pope, died 1744, Twicken With Gay is concluded, as far as the Abbey is concerned, the last of the brilliant circle of friends whose mutual correspondence and friendship give such an additional interest to their graves. One of these, however, we sorely miss. I have been told of one Pope,' says Goldsmith's May 30, Chinese philosopher, as he wanders through Poets' buried at Corner, murmuring at the obscure names of which he ham. had never heard before: 'Is he there?' 'It is time enough,' replied his guide, these hundred years: he is not long dead: 'people have not done hating him yet.' It was not, however, the hate of his contemporaries that kept his bust out of the Abbey, but his own deliberate wish to be interred, by the side of his beloved mother, in the central aisle of the parish church of Twickenham: and his epitaph, composed by himself, is inscribed on a white marble tablet above the gallery— 5 For one that would not be buried in Westminster Abbey. Heroes and kings! your distance keep, In peace let one poor poet sleep, Let Horace blush, and Virgil too. His epitaph. The Little Nightingale,' who withdrew from the boisterous company of London to those quiet shades, only to revisit them in his little chariot like Homer in a nutshell,' naturally rests there at last. With Pope's secession the line of poets is broken for a time. To make room for the monument, Butler's bust (by permission of Alderman Barber) was removed to its present position. (Chapter Book, October 31, 1733.) 2 From 'striking their aching bosoms.' (Biog. Brit. iv. 2187.) Johnson, iii. 215. 36 His filial piety excels Whatever genuine story tells.' (Swift.) Thackeray's Humourists, p. 207. Thomson, buried at None whose claims rested on their poetic merits alone were, after him, buried within the Abbey, till quite our own Richmond, days. Thomson, whose bust appears by the side of Shakspeare's monument, was interred in the parish church of his own favourite Richmond 1748; his monument in the Abbey, erected May 10, 1762. In yonder grave a Druid lies.' Gray could be buried nowhere but in that country churchyard of Stoke Pogis, which he has rendered immortal by his Gray, buried Elegy, and in which he anticipates his rest. His Pogis, 1771. monument, however, is placed by Milton's; and, both by the art of the sculptor, and the verses inscribed upon it by his friend Mason, is made to point not unfitly to Milton, thus at Stoke Mason, buried at Aston, in Yorkshire, 1797. completing that cycle of growing honour which we saw beginning with the tablet of Philips. And next to this cenotaph is also, in a natural sequence, that of Mason himself, with an inscription by his own friend Hurd. It may be well to take advantage of this pause in the succession to mark the memorials of other kinds of genius, HISTORICAL Casaubon, which have intermingled with the more strictly poetic 5 vein. Isaac Casaubon, interesting not only for his died July 1, great learning, but as one of those Protestants of the 1614. seventeenth century who, like Grotius and Grabe, looked with a kindly eye on the older Churches, had, on the death of his French patron Henri IV., received from James I. (although a layman) prebendal stalls at Canterbury, but lieth entombed,' says Fuller, 'in the south aisle of West'minster Abbey;' who then adds, with an emphasis which marks this tomb as the first in a new and long succession, not in the east or poetical side thereof where Chaucer, Spenser, Drayton are interred, but on the west or historical side of the ' aisle.' His monument was made by Stone for £60 at the cost of Thomas Morton, Bishop of learned men, dead or alive.' 6 of Durham, that great lover Next to it, and carrying on was laid the historian of the Scottish Walpole's Painters, 242. About the same time was buried in an un 1 buried Nov. the same affinity, is the bust of William Camden, by his close connection with Westminster, as its one lay Head-master, and as the Prince of English antiquaries, well deserving Camden. his place in this Broad Aisle,' in which he was 10, 1623. laid with great pomp; all the College of Heralds attending the funeral of their chief. Christopher Sutton preached a good 'modest sermon.'2 Both of these plain tombs,' adds Fuller, marking their peculiar appearance at the time, 'made of white marble, show the simplicity of their intentions, the candidness of their natures, and perpetuity of their memories.' On Isaac Casaubon's tablet is left the trace of another Casaubon's candid and simple nature.' Izaak Walton,3-who monument. may in his youth have seen his venerable namesake, to whom indeed Casaubon perhaps gave his Christian name, who was a friend of his son Meric and of his patron Morton, and who loses no occasion of commending that man of rare learning and 'ingenuity forty years afterwards, wandering through the South Transept, scratched his well-known monogram Izaak on the marble, with the date 1658, earliest of those Walton's unhappy inscriptions of names of visitors, which have 1658. since defaced so many a sacred space in the Abbey. O si sic omnia! We forgive the Greek soldiers who recorded their journey on the foot of the statue at Ipsambul; the Platonist who has left his name in the tomb of Rameses at Thebes; the Roman Emperor who has carved his attestation of Memnon's music on the colossal knees of Amenophis. Let us, in like manner, forgive the angler for this mark of himself in Poets' Corner. Camden's monument long ago bore traces Camden's of another kind. The Cavaliers, or, as some said, the monument. Independents, who broke into the Abbey at night, to deface the hearse of the Earl of Essex, 'used the like uncivil deportment towards the effigies of old learned Camden-cut in 'pieces the book held in his hand, broke off his nose, and otherwise defaced his visiognomy.' 4 6 monogram, A base villain-for certainly no person that had a right English soul could have done it-not suffering his monument to stand without |