The surroundings of Bath Abbey are strikingly Continental in appearance, for that great church stands in a flagged _place_, instead of being set in a green and shady close, as usually is the case in England. Its surroundings have always been thronged, from the time when the Flying Machines crawled, to when the last of the mail coaches drew up in front of the "White Lion," in the Market Place hard by, or at the "White Hart," which stood until 1866, where the "Grand Pump Room" Hotel now rises. The story of the Abbey is too long for these pages; but it is remarkable at once for being one of the very latest Gothic buildings in the country; for its possessing windows so large and so many that it has been called the "Lantern of England;" for its central tower, which is not square, being eleven feet narrower on its north and south sides than those to the east and west; and for the prodigious number of small marble and stone memorial tablets on its interior walls--tablets so many that they gave rise to the famous epigram by Quin:-- "These walls, so full of monument and bust, Shew how Bath waters serve to lay the dust." Quite distinguished dust it is, too. Noblemen and dames of high degree; Admirals of the Blue, the White, the Red; legal, and military, and clerical dignitaries, and all manner of Civil servants, mostly of the mid-eighteenth century, and chiefly hailing from India and the Colonies, as described with much pomp and circumstance on their cenotaphs which so thickly cover the walls, and spoil the architectural effect. "The Bath," was the solace of their kind, returning from the Tropics with nutmeg livers, gout, and autocratic ways. At "the Bath" they resided on half-pay, drank the waters, supported the local doctors, quarrelled with their neighbours, and consistently damned all "new-fangled notions," until death laid them by the heels. [Illustration: BATH ABBEY: THE WEST FRONT.] There must have been--if we are capable of believing their epitaphs--some paragons of all the virtues in those times, and Bath seems to have claimed them all. Here, for instance, is Alicia, Countess of Erroll, "in whom was combined every virtue that could adorn human nature." She died young; the world is too wicked for such. [Sidenote: _"JACOB'S LADDER"_]