We have digressed from our beaten path to follow after the lights of the theatrical profession, and shall afterwards find other well-known players in the cloisters. A glance round, as we stand in the western part of the transept, shows that we are {46} literally surrounded by familiar faces and much-loved authors. Of Addison we speak later, so may pass over his very inferior statue (by Westmacott), but just beyond we see the busts of Lord Macaulay and of Thackeray, and the medallion heads of Sir Walter Scott and of John Ruskin; below them is the grave of Charles Dickens. The lovers of music raise their eyes meantime to the unwieldy figure of Handel, whose personality remained essentially German although the greater part of his life was spent in England, at the Court of the first three Georges. Beneath his monument is the medallion of that gifted singer Jenny Lind Goldschmidt, placed there as a record of the many occasions when the Swedish nightingale interpreted Handel's beautiful music to the British public in a manner never excelled before or since. Close to us now is a reminder of the old monastic days--the door which leads into an ancient chapel used by the brethren as a vestry, and in the floor before it is the grave of Abbot Litlington, to whom we have alluded before and of whom we shall speak again. Near his is that of a humble monk, one Owen Tudor, who took sanctuary during the Wars of the Roses, and probably lived to see his nephew, Henry Tudor, on the English throne. Above the {47} door Oliver Goldsmith's name recalls the early days of the English novel, when the _Vicar of Wakefield_ was one of the very few in existence. Many of us have enjoyed his inimitable comedy, _She Stoops to Conquer_, on the stage, as well as those popular plays, _The Rivals_ and _The School for Scandal_, by the other eighteenth-century Irish dramatist, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, whose tombstone is beneath our feet. That great portrait painter Sir Joshua Reynolds is responsible for the position and design of Goldsmith's medallion, which spoils the architecture, and is so high that even classical scholars rarely attempt to decipher Dr. Johnson's pompous inscription. The cynical English lines, which the poet Gay wrote for his own tablet close by, are far more often noticed:-- Life is a jest and all things show it; I thought so once and now I know it.