Honoured by such a trust, we who serve God daily in the great Abbey are not unmindful of the duty which lies on us to preserve and to restore, to the best of our power, the general fabric; and to call on government and on private persons to preserve and restore those monuments, for which they, not we, are responsible. A stranger will not often enter our Abbey without finding somewhere or other among its vast arcades, skilled workmen busy over mosaic, marble, bronze, or ‘storied window richly dight;’ and the very cloisters, which to Washington Irving’s eye were ‘discoloured with damp, crumbling with age, and crusted with a coat of hoary moss,’ are being repaired till that ‘rich tracery of the arches, and that leafy beauty of the roses which adorn the keystones’—of which he tells—shall be as sharp and bright as they were first, 500 years ago. One sentiment, again, which was called up in the mind of your charming essayist, at the sight of Westminster Abbey, I have not felt myself: I mean its sadness. ‘What,’ says he, ‘is this vast assembly of sepulchres but a treasury of humiliation? a huge pile of reiterated homilies on the emptiness of renown and the certainty of oblivion.’ So does that ‘mournful magnificence’ of which he speaks, seem to have weighed on him, that he takes for the motto of his whole essay, that grand Elizabethan epigram— When I behold, with deep astonishment, To famous Westminster how there resort Living in brasse or stony monument, The Princes and the worthies of all sort; Do I not see re-formed nobilitie, Without contempt, or pride, or ostentation, And look upon offenseless majestie, Naked of pomp or earthly domination? And how a play-game of a painted stone Contents the quiet, now, and silent sprites, Whom all the world, which late they stood upon, Could not content, nor quench their appetites. Life is a frost of cold felicities; And death the thaw of all our vanities. True, true—who knows it not, who has lived fifty years in such a world as this?—and yet but half the truth.