“Four hundred years of memory are crowded into that dark old church, and the great flood of change beats round the walls, and shakes the door in vain, but never enters. The dead stand thick together there, as if to make a brave resistance to the moving world outside, which jars upon their slumber. It is a church of the dead. I cannot fancy any one being married in that church—its air would chill the boldest bride that ever walked to the altar.” So Joe Burton well says, sitting in his “old place”—the bench which stood in front of Sir Thomas More’s monument, close to the altar-rails. But for all that, it is not a depressing but rather a delightful old church, if you sit here of a summer afternoon; the sun streaming in from the south-west, slanting on the stone effigies, and the breeze breathing in through the little door beside More’s monument, shaking the grass outside, and the noble river sparkling beyond the embankment garden. To me it has more of fascination than any church in London. Its entire absence of architectural effect in its varying styles; its retention to this day of the simplicity of the village church, even as when built; its many monuments and mural tablets, each one a page of English history; its family escutcheons; its tattered battle flags hung above; the living memories that are built in with every dead stone: all these combine to make it the quaintest, the most impressive, the most lovable of churches. Dean Stanley was fond of calling it one of the Chapters of his Abbey. This is not the place for a description of the monuments, nor for details of their inscriptions; which make us think, as they did the boy Jim Burton, that these buried here “were the best people who ever lived.” Only the tenant of one plain stone coffin is modest in his simple request cut thereon: “Of your Charitie pray for the soul of Edmund Bray, Knight.” As for most of the others, I quite agree with Jim, that the Latin, in which their long epitaphs are written, was the only language appropriate; the English tongue being “utterly unfit to express the various virtues of these wonderful Chelsea people;” among whom, it strikes me, too, that “Sir Thomas More was the most obstinately determined that posterity should hear his own account of himself.” His black marble slab, set deep under a plain grey Gothic arch, is placed on the chancel wall, just where he used to stand in his “surplisse;” above it is his punning crest, a Moor’s head on a shield; and on it is cut his own long Latin inscription, sent by him to his friend Erasmus, who thought it worth printing in his collection of “Tracts and Letters” (Antwerp, 1534). Twice have the characters been recut; and each time has care been taken, for his memory’s sake, to leave blank the last word of the line, which describes him as “troublesome to thieves, murderers and _heretics_.” To the sturdy old Catholic these were all equal—all criminals to be put out of the way.