However, we did not climb all this height to talk of cats and pigeons; and if you once find yourselves in this strange place you will give them but little thought. For under our feet is a great stone sea--vast circular pits and troughs of solid stone--a very maelstrom of rock. Each of those great wells narrowing towards the bottom represents one of the gigantic pendants below. And here one's wonder is I think increased sevenfold, and we ask how was it possible to poise this prodigious weight on those slender walls. If we want an answer to our question we must look outside the chapel, and observe the graceful Flying Buttresses, which hold roof and walls together, springing from the upper part of the windows, and ending in tall turrets which run down and bury themselves in the ground. The buttresses are so light, and so richly carved, and the turrets look so completely ornamental, with their crockets, and the delicate canopies over the niches--empty alas! and their string-course formed of the Tudor arms, that one thinks of them merely as a lovely part of a lovely whole. So they are. But they are one of the chief means of binding that splendid roof together--of keeping the walls from being pulled inward by the mass of stone they have to support. They act like the guy-ropes which keep a flagstaff upright. Thus far we have seen how by Edward the Sixth's time the mediæval architecture has given place to the Tudor, the feudal Gothic to the more domestic Perpendicular. But in the constitution of the Abbey a far more momentous change had taken place. In Henry the Eighth's reign the Reformation shook the life of England to its very foundation. It is not my intention to enter upon that vast and deeply important subject. I only wish to show you some of its effects on Westminster Abbey. The Abbey and Monastery of Westminster shared in the general Dissolution of Monasteries in 1539. The last Abbot of Westminster was converted into a Dean, and "the Monks were succeeded by twelve Prebendaries, each to be present daily in the Choir, and to preach once a quarter."[43] The "Abbot's Place" was to be known henceforth as the "Deanery." And for us, who have known that Deanery in the brilliant days of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, what memories does the name awake. But more. All the relics in the Abbey that had been given, as we have seen, by successive kings, and with them Llewellyn's golden crown, and the banners and statues around the shrine of St. Edward, all these were swept away as worthless or worse than worthless. Even the bones of the Confessor were not respected; but were moved and buried apart, until Queen Mary brought them back and laid them once more in the shrine where they had reposed so long, and where they rest to this day. Then robbers broke into the Abbey and carried off, among other treasures, the silver head from Henry the Fifth's monument. And in Edward the Sixth's reign, when the spirit