If one wishes to thoroughly and completely appreciate the worthlessness of human reputation, he should walk through these walls and over these floors. While the fame of the heroes, poets and statesmen have been carefully cared for, the nobodies buried here and hereabouts, and there are thousands of them, have been permitted to fade out mercilessly. Sir Toby Belch, we will say, or Sir Toby Anybody Else, who was so circumstanced that he received the honor of being buried in the Abbey or the grounds adjacent, lies here under a slab, on which is a long inscription. The slab is here; but alas! where is the inscription? The iron-nailed shoes of generations have as completely obliterated it as though a chisel had been used for the purpose. But not so the actually great. The slab that covers the remains of Dickens has flowers placed upon it every day, and the inscriptions to the memory of Shakespeare, Byron, Handel, Haydn, Macaulay, Sheridan, Garrick, Rare Ben Johnson, and others, who made English literature, and the innumerable warriors by land and sea who have extended English possessions and defended England's greatness, are kept as distinct and as bright as the day they were erected. One singular thing is that there are no bad men buried in the Abbey; that is, if you may believe the marble inscriptions. Marble is a bad material to tell lies upon, because of the limited space that can be used. Were there more room there would be more lies, I suppose, but the English have managed it tolerably well. There was Warren Hastings, for instance, Governor-General of India, who in his day was held up as a monster of cruelty, and a model of rapacity and oppression. Even the English Parliament and the East India Company were forced to protest against his extreme cruelty to the East Indians. Nevertheless Hastings has a bust in the Abbey, and an inscription on it, in which he is given every virtue under the sun. He is extolled as being all that was merciful, just, kind, good, and wise, and if there is a virtue that is not ascribed to him, the man who wrote it forgot it. As a matter of curiosity I copied the epitaph, and here it is:-- SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF THE RIGHT HONORABLE WARREN HASTINGS, _Governor-General of Bengal_, _Member of His Majesty's Most Honorable Privy Council, L. L. D., F. R. S._ _Descended from the elder branch of the Ancient and Noble Family of Huntingdon._ [Sidenote: WARREN HASTINGS.]