Highways and Byways in LondonCook, Emily Constance Baird
History
Highways and Byways in London
Cook, Emily Constance Baird
London (England) -- Description and travel
"If Westminster Abbey," said C. R. Leslie, "has its _Poets'
Corner_, so has St. Paul's its _Painters' Corner_. Sir
Joshua Reynolds's statue, by Flaxman, is here, and Reynolds
himself lies buried here; and Barry, and Opie, and Lawrence
are around him; and, above all, the ashes of the great Van
Dyck are in the earth under the cathedral."
Turner now lies next to Reynolds. Yet, as a rule, the great
commemorated in St. Paul's are of a different type to those of
Westminster. Both churches are the mausoleums of heroes; St. Paul's
being, however, by common consent the resting-place of the Militant,
Westminster of the Pacific. The statue of Dr. Johnson, under the dome,
opposes that of Howard. Though his dust rests in Westminster Abbey,
the militant spirit of the Sage well deserves commemoration in St.
Paul's. His representation, in the curious art of the time, as a
half-clothed muscular athlete, is appropriately supplemented by that
of Howard, bare-legged, with Roman toga and tunic. The coincidence of
Johnson holding a scroll, and Howard a prison key, has caused the two
to be sometimes mistaken by visitors for St. Peter and St. Paul! But
not all the monumental vagaries are as innocuous as these. Westminster
Abbey does not alone suffer from the bad taste of the Renaissance; a
few of the monuments of St. Paul's are alike trials to the eyes as to
the faith. The naked warriors in sandals, receiving swords from, or
falling into the arms of, smart feminine "Victories,"--_lusus naturae_
with wings protruding from their shoulders,--are, indeed, sad
instances of the too rampant eighteenth-century exuberance of fancy.
Of the monuments, for instance, to Captains Burgess and Westcott,
Allan Cunningham remarks:
"The two naval officers (Westcott and Burgess), are naked,
which destroys historic probability; it cannot be a
representation of what happened, for no British warriors go
naked into battle, or wear sandals or Asiatic mantles....
When churchmen declared themselves satisfied, the ladies
thought they might venture to draw near, but the flutter of
fans and the averting of faces was prodigious. That Victory,
a modest and well-draped dame, should approach an undrest
dying man, and crown him with laurel, might be endured--but,
how a well-dressed young lady could think of presenting a
sword to a naked gentleman went far beyond all their notions
of propriety."
Neither is the ugly group of the Bishop of Calcutta, ogre-like in
size, apparently confirming two Indian dwarfs, at all calculated to
excite any feeling but amusement.
The great cathedral has, nevertheless, also its monumental treasures.
Under the third arch on the north of the nave, is the noble monument
of the Duke of Wellington, by Alfred Stevens; the aged Duke lying,
"like a Scaliger of Verona, deeply sleeping upon a lofty bronze
sarcophagus." One thinks of Tennyson's lines:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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