Every Monday and Tuesday, as is generally known, the whole Abbey is thrown open to sightseers, who may range unguided, and as they list, through the beautiful Henry VII. Chapel and the side chapels. The shrine of the Confessor is in a very shattered and mouldering state, but the wonder is that everything is in such excellent preservation. A reason is given for this state of decay. Once, when they were putting up Lord Bath’s monument, in presence of a great crowd, a mob broke in, so that a number of gentlemen who were standing on the ledge at the back of one of the royal tombs were seized with a panic and tore down the canopy of the tomb to defend themselves with the fragments. There is an odd bit of economy, by-the-way, in the direction of showmanship which might be remedied, and which has an air of shabbiness, viz., the setting out the names of the tombs and chapels on dirty cards in pen and ink. As we make our careless and perhaps superficial promenade from chapel to chapel, we are almost bewildered by the number and variety of the huge edifices, rather than monuments, which record the memory of the great seigneurs who repose below. These are all of grand and solemn proportions--great gloomy pillared archings and entablatures--huge altars below, tiers and galleries, and angelic or kneeling figures. The materials are of the richest--costly deep-toned marbles and bronzes. Connected with each there is a regular history, which chroniclers like Dean Stanley have set out at great length. Indeed, a full history of Westminster Abbey would fill many a portly volume. We may, without following in the laborious steps of these historians, take a few glimpses at the more striking, and that without any order. These vast structures, often of a solid and massive pattern, rising to sixty or seventy feet, with columns, arches, carvings, bronzes and rich onyx-like marbles, could not have been reared in our time under some twenty thousand pounds, the Wellington monument, not nearly so elaborate, costing some twenty-seven thousand. Here, for instance, in St. John the Baptist’s Chapel, we find ourselves before Lord Hunsdon’s enormous monument, which is truly imposing, and considered by Fuller “the most magnificent” in the Abbey. As Dean Stanley points out, its sumptuousness was intended as an _amende_ for the earldom three times granted and three times revoked, the Queen herself coming to him when he was dying and laying the patent on his bed. “Madam,” was his reply, “seeing you accounted me not worthy of this honour whilst I was living, I count myself unworthy of it now that I am dying.” It is worth while thinking of this scene, as we gaze on its stupendous and stately proportions, and learn that it is the loftiest in the place. But what a point this little story gives to this spectacle of empty magnificence!