England -- Description and travel; Literary landmarks -- England; Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 -- Homes and haunts -- England
Among the monuments hard by is a fine marble bust of Milton, placed
against the wall, and it is said, by way of enhancing its value, that
George the Third came here to see it.¹ Several of the neighbouring
inscriptions are of astonishing quaintness. The adjacent churchyard--an
eccentric, sequestered, lonesome bit of grassy ground, teeming with
monuments, and hemmed in with houses, terminates, at one end, in a piece
of the old Roman wall of London (A.D. 306),--an adamantine structure of
cemented flints--which has lasted from the days of Constantine, and
which bids fair to last forever. I shall always remember that strange
nook with the golden light of a summer morning shining upon it, the
birds twittering among its graves, and all around it such an atmosphere
of solitude and rest as made it seem, though in the heart of the great
city, a thousand miles from any haunt of man. (It was formally opened as
a garden for public recreation on July 8, 1891.)
¹ This memorial bears the following inscription: "John Milton. Author of
'Paradise Lost.' Born, December 1608. Died, November 1674. His father,
John Milton, died, March 1646. They were both interred in this church."
St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, an ancient and venerable temple, the church of
the priory of the nuns of St. Helen, built in the thirteenth century, is
full of relics of the history of England. The priory, which adjoined
this church, has long since disappeared and portions of the building
have been restored; but the noble Gothic columns and the commemorative
sculpture remain unchanged. Here are the tombs of Sir John Crosby, who
built Crosby Place (1466), Sir Thomas Gresham, who founded both Gresham
College and the Royal Exchange in London, and Sir William Pickering,
once Queen Elizabeth's Minister to Spain and one of the amorous
aspirants for her royal hand; and here, in a gloomy chapel, stands the
veritable altar at which, it is said, the Duke of Gloster received
absolution, after the disappearance of the princes in the Tower.
Standing at that altar, in the cool silence of the lonely church and the
waning light of afternoon, it was easy to conjure up his slender,
slightly misshapen form, decked in the rich apparel that he loved, his
handsome, aquiline, thoughtful face, the drooping head, the glittering
eyes, the nervous hand that toyed with the dagger, and the stealthy
stillness of his person, from head to foot, as he knelt there before the
priest and perhaps mocked both himself and heaven with the form of
prayer.
Illustration: "Sir John Crosby's Monument."
Every place that Richard touched is haunted by his magnetic presence. In
another part of the church you are shown the tomb of a person whose will
provided that the key of his sepulchre should be placed beside his body,
and that the door should be opened once a year, for a hundred years. It
seems to have been his expectation to awake and arise; but the allotted
century has passed and his bones are still quiescent.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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