As we walked down the north transept the old lady asked me if it was true that "Old Parr" was buried in the Abbey, and I took her to read the inscription on the stone in Poet's Corner. "Old Parr's" qualification for hob-nobbing with the élite in art and literature lies in the fact that he died at the age of 152, and lived in the reigns of ten sovereigns, an achievement great enough, it was considered, to earn him the right to such distinguished burial. How came it, I wonder, that this solitary human being was endowed with such powers of resistance to natural decay? There must have been something weird about that old man. Taylor, the poet, in his description of him, says:-- "From head to heel, his body hath all over A quick set, thick set, natural, hairy cover." Was Old Parr a throw-back to our ancestor the ape? Mrs. Darling said he must have outlived all his relations and been very lonely, and to reassure her I mentioned that if he outlived old ties he also made new ones, marrying his second wife (only his second) at the age of 120, and having by her one child. Mrs. D. retorted that he ought to have been ashamed of himself, which struck me as inconsistent. Parr's first wife had no doubt been dead a great many years, and all those years he had presumably been waiting for the end which never came. When, at the age of 120, he found himself still alive, and still hale and hearty, he would begin to think it was about time to accept things as they were and start life all over again. That my thoughts in Poet's Corner, by the way, concerned themselves with "Old Parr" to the exclusion of Garrick, Johnson, Thackeray, Dickens, Coleridge, and Spenser, the "Prince of Poets," must have been Mrs. D.'s fault. I prefer Monday for a visit to the chapels, not because one saves sixpence, but because I never follow in the footsteps of a guide without a humiliating sense of being one of a hungry mob of chickens round the man with the bag of grain. It is much more exciting to go pecking about on your own, and on Mondays you can loiter unmolested where you will, and for as long as you will. The north aisle of Henry VII's Chapel, where Queen Elizabeth is buried, invariably draws me, and I led the way there, first. Strangely enough, it is often empty, and always quiet. One's thoughts of Elizabeth mingle curiously with those of her hated half-sister, "Bloody Queen Mary," who is buried below Elizabeth, and who was, according to Sandford, "interred without any monument or other remembrance". It is strange to note the unequal distribution of favours in the matter of burial. Charles II, for instance, has nothing more than his name and the dates of his birth and death recorded in small letters on the pavement of the chapel in the south aisle. Pepys says of Charles, "He was very obscurely buried at night without any manner of pomp, and soon forgotten after all his vanity".