The Library is a place of little interest to one who has but little time. You look with reverence at the great bell, which thunders out the death of time from hour to hour, and only tolls when a Prince’s departure, or that of some great ecclesiastic, is to be announced to the nation. The vastness of the clock and its dial, give you fresh impressions of the enormous scale of everything about you, and the Whispering Gallery is reached with a sense of fatigue, which quite accords with this effect. Here a bore of a fellow shows off the petty experiment of the whisper, and stuns you by slamming a door; after which you are vexed to find that the paintings of the dome have disappeared under the humid influences of the London climate. It is only when these first annoyances are over, that you regain entire command of your thoughts, and are able to measure “the length and breadth, and depth and height,” of the noble dome within whose concavity you are now walking about, and perchance listening to the glorious swell of the organ below. The architecture of this dome becomes easily understood, as one ascends between its inner and outer surfaces, and one cannot but regret to find that the former is so vastly disproportioned to the latter. Here the triumph of Michael Angelo, and the one grand superiority of St. Peter’s, begins to be powerfully felt. Wren has constructed his dome prosaically; the rhetoric and the poetry of architecture are sublimely displayed in the work of the mighty Florentine. During the ascent, you emerge from time to time to open air, and get external views from the successive galleries. London chimneys are, at first, below you, and then the steeples, and then even its canopy of smoke and vapour; and all its mingling sounds come to your ear at last like the murmur of the sea. “How dizzy ’tis to cast one’s eyes so low.” The elevation is indeed considerable; but with such a Babel at one’s feet; with the fleets and the treasures of nations all in sight; and with a million of men swarming like ants in their mole-hill, just below, it is one’s own fault if the moral elevation be not far more sublime, and if the impressions of the hour are not forcibly suggestive of a glimpse of the world from the mansions of eternity. After a very cursory inspection of the ill-judged sculpture in the nave and transepts, and a more affectionate visit to the statue of Howard, to the kneeling figure of Heber, and that of Bishop Middleton, which represents him as confirming two Indian children, I had time to survey the crypts before the Evening Service. Here lie Reynolds, and West, and Lawrence, and several of their brothers of the Academy; and here, in a sort of chapel, which admits the external air and light through a grating, lies the architect himself—the truly great Sir Christopher. “Lie heavy on him earth, for he Laid many a heavy load on thee!”