As, then, the Appian Way was to the Romans, so is Westminster Abbey to us, our "Highway of Tombs." As the stranger walks along the vast Nave and the Transepts, he passes through a veritable City of the Dead, commemorated here by every kind of monument, statue, bust, tablet, cenotaph, tomb. Here are now no more the simple tombs and effigies of the earliest time, no more the rich, imposing magnificence of the mediæval shrines, but a later efflorescence of sculpture and ornament, an efflorescence differing as widely from the severity of former ages, as the laudatory epitaphs differ from the simplicity and humility of the early inscriptions. Justice and Mercy, Neptune and Britannia, cherubs and clouds, are generally very painfully in evidence, and in their vast size and depressing ubiquity testify to the false taste of their day. Nor are the monuments always deserved. "Some day," said Carlyle, cynically, "there will be a terrible gaol-delivery in Westminster Abbey!" The worst of such theatrical sculpture is, also, that it always takes up so much room; we, in our day, should often be glad of the space of one cloudlet,--of one unnecessary virtue,--for the modest perpetuation of a great man's memory. Who now recalls the merits of the forgotten magnates of past ages? but Dickens's humble grave-stone is ever freshly tended, bright with geranium or violet. Ruskin's small tablet and bas-relief must hang in a dark, unnoticed, corner, and Tennyson's bust is relegated to a pillar of Poet's Corner. And what is left, one may ask, of our National Valhalla, for the great names of a future age? The solemn dignity of the Confessor's Chapel, and of Henry VIIth's beautiful chapel behind it, have, after the crude monuments of the Nave, all the calm of a secluded byway after the clamour of a noisy street.