With its Hall and its Abbey, Westminster can never cease to be interesting, attractive, and picturesque. Here, if anywhere, we are in the very heart of English history, and can, at our bidding, summon a long procession of sovereigns, prelates, statesmen, soldiers, wits, and scholars. Standing before the Abbey, with the river close at hand, we think of those ancient days when all the adjacent ground was a marsh, so environed with water, and beset with brambles, as to acquire the name of Thorney Island: a wild, bleak, barren spot, almost at the very gates of London, yet apart from it; inhabited only by poor and outcast people, or perchance by banditti, who levied contributions on the rich nobles and merchants, and then escaped to their fastnesses among the thickets of the fenny isle. Then--somewhere about 616--came Sebert, King of the East Saxons, who, according to tradition, founded the Benedictine monastery of which the Abbey is a noble relic. West Minster--the Minster west of St. Paul's, originally called East Minster, according to some accounts--took its rise from that time, and speedily became a place of great importance. The brambles disappeared; the land was drained; the creeks and ditches of the Thames were made to retire into their natural channel; walls and pinnacles arose out of the wet and dreary soil; and the chant of the Benedictines was heard along the river-banks, and in the neighbouring fields. After a while, houses grew up around the monastery, and population was attracted to a spot which the Monarchy and the Church were beginning to favour. The religious foundation was enlarged by King Edgar, and afterwards by Edward the Confessor; and from the time of the latter to that of Queen Victoria, all our kings and queens have been crowned within the walls of the Abbey. Many, also, are buried in the same building, which gives occasion to moralising Jeremy Taylor to observe:--"In the same Escurial where the Spanish princes live in greatness and power, and decree war or peace, they have wisely placed a cemetery, where their ashes and their glory shall sleep till time shall be no more; and where our kings have been crowned, their ancestors lie interred, and they must walk over their grandsire's head to take his crown." Whether for kings or humble men, there is no place better adapted to this vein of thought than Westminster Abbey.