“It is certain there is not a nobler amusement, than a walk in Westminster Abbey, among the tombs of heroes, patriots, poets, and philosophers; you are surrounded with the shades of your great forefathers; you feel the influence of their venerable society, and grow fond of fame and virtue in the contemplation: ’tis the finest school of morality, and the most beautiful flatterer of imagination in nature. I appeal to any man’s mind that has any taste for what is sublime and noble, for a witness to the pleasure he experiences on this occasion; and I dare believe he will acknowledge, that there is no entertainment so various, or so instructive. For my own part, I have spent many an hour of pleasing melancholy in its venerable walks; and have been more delighted with the solemn conversation of the dead, than the most sprightly sallies of the living. I have examined the characters that were inscribed before me, and distinguished every particular virtue. The monuments of real fame, I have viewed with real respect; but the piles that wanted a character to excuse them, I considered as the monuments of folly. I have wandered with pleasure into the most gloomy recesses of this last resort of grandeur, to contemplate human life, and trace mankind thro’ all the wilderness of their frailties and misfortunes, from their cradles to their grave. I have reflected on the shortness of our duration here, and that I was but one of the millions who had been employed in the same manner, in ruminating on the trophies of mortality before me; that I must moulder to dust in the same manner, and quit the scene to a new generation, without leaving the shadow of my existence behind me; that this huge fabric, this sacred repository of fame and grandeur, would only be the stage for the same performances; would receive new accessions of noble dust; would be adorned with other sepulchres of cost and magnificence; would be crouded with successive admirers; and at last, by the unavoidable decays of time, bury the whole collection of antiquities in general obscurity, and be the monument of its own ruin.” ABBOTS LANGLEY, a village in Hertfordshire, situated to the east of Kings Langley, and three or four miles to the S. W. of St. Alban’s, to whose abbey it once belonged. It is famous for being the birth place of Nicholas Breakspeare, who was made Pope by the title of Adrian IV. and had his stirrup held by the Emperor Frederic while he dismounted: but notwithstanding his pride, it is a still more indelible stain to his memory, that when Sovereign Pontiff, he suffer’d his mother to be maintained by the alms of the church of Canterbury. This place gives the title of Baron to the Lord Raymond, who has a seat in this neighbourhood.