But the Abbey was a national institution, too firmly builded on the rocks to be more than shaken by the passing storms. It had weathered the earthquake of the Reformation, it had survived the tempests of the Revolution. With the Restoration came the calm, and quietly the old life was resumed. I have but little more to tell you of the inner story of the Abbey, nor from this time forward do kings and queens play any very important part in its story. It is the tombs and monuments which now begin, more closely even than before, to cement the tie between Westminster and the pages of English history. So I will only tell you in a few words how Dean Sprat busied himself with the restoration of the great buildings, the architect being Sir Christopher Wren, who, as you know, designed St. Paul’s Cathedral, and rebuilt so many of the old London churches which the Great Fire had destroyed, and how Dean Atterbury carried on the work, including the rebuilding of the great dormitory, until his devotion to the Stuart cause and his opposition to George I. caused him to be sent first to the Tower, and afterwards as an exile to France. Atterbury loved well his Abbey, and his last request was that he might walk through it once more, especially to see the glass which was his own gift to it, and which still exists in the beautiful rose window over the north door. But the sad thing about these so-called restorations is that so much of the matchless old work was destroyed, and nobody seemed in the least concerned at this. That was an age when the glories of medieval architecture appear to have lost all their charm in men’s eyes, when the love of beautiful things was at its lowest ebb. The Westminster boys played their games in the chapels, and were allowed to skip from tomb to tomb in the Confessor’s shrine; hideous monuments were erected and crowded together, nothing old was reverenced, and we can only be thankful that more was not destroyed or hopelessly ruined. And yet, in spite of this apparent indifference, here and there were men who found themselves stirred when they came within those walls as they were stirred nowhere else, so that many a writer, including Addison, Steele, and Goldsmith, and earlier still, John Milton, has paid homage, even in those unimaginative days, to that fair place, "so far exceeding human excellence that a man would think it was knit together by the fingers of angels."