Jhu fili dei miserere mei J P [Illustration] Well might he ask pity from above, for, poor man, in the days of his adversity he found none below. Let us hope, however, that the malediction which tradition says the dying man pronounced upon those who should despoil his house has lost its force, if it ever had any, and that a Braddyll and an Assheton may now step across his grave without risk of destruction. But the glory of Whalley is the famous abbey, with which Whitaker’s history has made us so familiar. Though it is now only a picturesque ruin— A pile decayed, ... in cunning fashion laid, Ruined buttress, moss-clad stone, Arch with ivy overgrown, Stairs round which the lichens creep, The whole a desolated heap— there yet remains much to delight the eye. The groined gateway shrouded in the gloom of a stately avenue of limes, the spacious hospitium, the cloister court, with its beautifully-decorated arches, the chapter-house, the abbot’s lodgings, the refectory, and the huge kitchens, with their capacious fire-places, may still be seen, but the crowning feature of all, the glorious conventual church, with its choir and its transepts, has disappeared, a small fragment of the walls and the foundations of its mighty pillars alone remaining. Corbel and capital, mullion and transom, broken columns and fragments of masonry lie strewn about, some half buried in the rank grass and nettles, telling the story of its former magnificence. Until recent years, when it was blown down in a storm, an ancient cherry tree that must have been in its prime when Whalley was in the fulness of its glory, grew in one of the courts, contributing its fair white blossoms to the summer beauty. There you can see where the monks sat in the sanctuary; that grass-grown court was their cemetery; yonder is the nameless tomb of a forgotten abbot; and that arch, with a span of nearly eighteen feet, marks the resting-place of another. Verily, the monks of Whalley were as splendid in their obsequies as in their hospitalities. The floor is carpeted with turf, and the walls are canopied by the heavens; ivy, the flower of ruin, lends its melancholy charm, and the clustering masses that uphold the crumbling buttresses spread their garniture of green to hide the signs of decay, and mock the greyness of time with a decoration that lasts but for a season. As you wander about seeking for the best points of view, or musing upon the fallen fortunes of the house, you will gaze again and again upon the broken arches and the empty windows, and think How many hearts have here grown cold, That sleep these mouldering stones among; How many beads have here been told; How many matins have been sung.