But now you come to the circular vault, upheld by massive pillars, and lighted partially from the dome above, but more strongly by gas-burners, where you stand before the sepulchre of Nelson. The sarcophagus is an empty relic of Cardinal Wolsey’s ambition, but looks so modern, that one is tempted to believe he ordered it in prophetic spirit, expressly for its present purpose. After all, it is not Nelson’s sepulchre, for he is buried under it. The hero and the ecclesiastic have alike been compelled to accept a “little earth for charity,” and this hollow semblance of a coffin dangles like that of Mohammed, between them. Alas! that Nelson’s tomb should suggest any meaner thoughts than those of his genius and glory; but it was in fact a relief to turn to the simple monument of Collingwood, and to be able to say, here lies not only a decaying hero, but a slumbering Christian. I looked for the monument of Dr. Donne with especial interest. You grope amid interesting relics of old St. Paul’s, a fragment of Lord Chancellor Hatton’s effigy, a piece of Dean Colet’s, and another of Sir Nicholas Bacon’s. At last, in one corner of a dismal cell, feebly lighted by a grated window from without, you see the old worthy, in his shroud, precisely as Walton describes the figure, but leaning against the wall like a ghost, or rather like one of the dried corpses in the Morgue, on the Great St. Bernard. You think of his truly heavenly mind, and strange life; of his rusty old poetry, and sound old sermons; of his ancestor, Sir Thomas More, and of his descendant, William Cowper. It is strange that no one ever thinks of Cowper as the inheritor of this double genius, and as owing some features of his intellect not less to the rhyming Dean of St. Paul’s, than to the author of _Utopia_. One would hope that under the Deanship of another poet, the graceful and scholarly Milman, this one historic relic of the old cathedral, and of a brother of the sacred lyre, might be set in a fitter place, or at least more decently erected in the place where it now seems irreverently set aside to moulder and be forgotten.