But St. Peter’s has manifold attractions beyond its bells. It has brasses and effigies, and monuments of every variety, commemorating the pious deeds of clergy and laity, warriors and comedians. Its vestry has pictures and tapestry and quaint alabaster carvings; little chapels jutting out from the nave like transepts, perpetuate the memory of old benefactors; and beneath its pavement lie the remains of the great philosopher Sir Thomas Browne, whose words of rebuke to the sepulchral ambition of the nameless tenants of monuments that make no record of those that lie beneath, involuntarily arise to the mind while contemplating the spot chosen for his last resting place. “Had they made so good a provision for their names as they have done for their relics, they had not so grossly erred in the act of perpetuation; but to subsist in bones, to be but pyramidically extant, is a fallacy of duration.” And again, “to live indeed is to be again ourselves, which being not only our hope, but an evidence in noble believers; ’tis all one to lie in St. Innocent’s church-yard or the sands of Egypt. Ready to be anything in the ecstacy of being ever, as content with six foot as the moles of Adrianus.” Happy philosophy, that could permit him calmly to contemplate the vicissitudes to which his bones might be subjected, even to the legitimate possibility of the sanctuary chosen for their resting-place being actually invaded by the blows of the workmen’s pickaxe, as veritably did occur some few years since, when the curious of the present generation were thus accidentally afforded an opportunity of cultivating a personal acquaintance with the anatomical outlines and phrenological developments of one whose intellectual offspring had been canonized, and enshrined among the household gods of the learned and the great for more than a century. The very slight sketches of eminent characters that are suitable for so light and general a book as this, may perhaps be legitimately introduced in the course of a tour among the churches, their _parochial headships_ affording the best facilities for arrangement; but it seems almost sacrilege to hash up into abridgements or synopses, biographies so fraught with national and European interest, as are many of those whose birth-place has been the Old City of Norwich, yet more is impossible within the compass of the _Rambler’s_ pen; and to adopt the alternative of omitting all mention of such names, would be to blot out some of the brightest pages from the annals of its history.