After we had carefully inspected this interesting hall, Lord John was as good as his word, and took us to see the robes, but precisely where he took us, it would be hard for me to say. It was in some room contiguous, where a fidgety little woman with keys in her hands, attended as mistress of the robes, and opening the repository of the sacred vestments, displayed them with such profound obsequiousness to the mildly dignified ecclesiastic who conducted us, that if she called him “my lord” once, she did so some twenty times in a single minute. The readers of Mrs. Strickland’s “Queens of England” will not require me to enlarge upon these superb vestments, now dimmed and faded in their splendour by the lapse of nearly two centuries, since they were made for the coronation of the luckless, and almost brainless, James the Second. They are worn at coronations only, by the clergy of the Abbey, and we had the pleasure of seeing our reverend guide in his appropriate cope as Sub-dean; the same which he wore when Victoria was crowned, and which has been worn by his predecessors, successively, at the coronations of William and Mary, Queen Anne, the four Georges, and William the Fourth. Similar vestments in form, though not in splendour, are to this day the rubrical attire of the clergy of the English Church in celebrating the Holy Communion, but I believe they are now never used, although they were in use at least in Durham Cathedral, so late as the middle of the last century. Having seen these interesting and historical vestments, we thanked the amiable dignitary, to whom we had been indebted for so much polite attention, and took our leave, emerging into Dean’s Yard, and so finding our way to the New Houses of Parliament. CHAPTER V. _Sight-seeing—Westminster Hall._