IX. WESTMINSTER ABBEY.

THE EXTERIOR.

As we approach from Parliament Street, the exquisitely beautiful and' most elaborately panelled and pinnacled architecture of the rounded end of Henry VII.'s Chapel meets the eye over the long line of St. Margaret's Church; into the burial-ground of which we step, in order to pass along the northern side of the Abbey. About the centre we pause to gaze on the blackened exterior of the front of the north transept, in which, however, many of the most delicate beauties of the sculpture, as well as all the bolder outlines of the tracery and the mouldings, are distinctly and happily marked by the light colour of the projecting edges. Time was when this front had its "statues of the twelve apostles at full length, with a vast number of other saints and martyrs, intermixed with intaglios, devices, and abundance of fretwork ;" and when it was called, for its extreme beauty, "Solomon's Porch ;" and now, even injured as it is, the whole forms a rich and beautiful façade. The rose window, thirtytwo feet in diameter, was rebuilt in 1722. Beyond the transept, the new appearance of a part of the exterior of the nave shows how extensive have been the reparations of recent years; and we may add, the remainder shows how necessary it is to go on. As we pass round the corner towards the west front, one can hardly resist the fancy that Wren, seeing how badly the Abbey needed its deficient towers, had taken a couple from some of his city churches, and placed them here. And who could for a moment mistake the ornaments of the clock for a part of a genuine gothic structure? At the right-hand corner of the western front, half concealing the beautiful decorations of its lower part, is the plain-looking exterior of the Jerusalem Chamber, forming, with the Hall, Dean's house, &c., a square, partly resting against the nave on the southern side of the Abbey, partly projecting beyond it. Passing along the exterior of these buildings, a gateway leads into the Dean's yard, a large quadrangle, where the modern houses contrast strangely with the ancient ones, lower portions with upper, large windows with green blinds and small rude ones scarce big enough to put one's head through, painted wooden doorways and arches so old and decayed one scarcely even ventures to guess how old they may be. From the Dean's yard we can again approach the Abbey,-the doorway in the corner, at the end of the pavement on our left, opening into a vaulted passage leading directly to the cloisters. From the grassy area of the latter you obtain a view, and we believe the only one, of the south transept, or rather of its upper portion. Passing along the south cloister, where the wall on your right is also the wall of the ancient refectory, to which the first doorway led, at the end you have on the right a low vaulted passage, which is considered a part of the Confessor's building, and where, in a small square called the Little Cloisters, stood the Chapel of St. Katherine, in which took place the scene between the Archbishops of York and Canterbury, so dramatically described by Holinshed, and on the left the East Cloister, with the low and well-barred door leading into the chamber of the Pix, and the exquisitely beautiful but much-injured entrance to the Chapter House. To this building, now used for the custody of records, and visited only by express permission from the Public Record Office, Chancery Lane, we might devote more pages than we have words to spare: so sumptuous were its architecture and its decorations,

and so interesting yet are the remains. The pavement, with its coloured tiles in heraldic and other devices, and the wall almost covered apparently with paintings, deserve even closer investigation than they have yet received. It is also rich in its curiosities here is, perhaps, the most valuable ancient historical document possessed by any nation in the world, the Domesday Book, in such exquisite preservation, and its calligraphy so perfect, that it scarcely appears as many years old as it is centuries. The large gold seal appended to the treaty between Henry VIII. and Francis is not only interesting for its associations, but for its intrinsic merit. The sculptor was no other than Cellini. Passing though the Chapter House, and turning round to look at the exterior of the building we have quitted, the most melancholy-looking part of the Abbey is before us; and it is that which is necessarily the most seen, standing as it does against the entrance to Poets' Corner. The magnificent windows bricked and plastered up, two or three smaller ones being formed instead in the hideous walls which fill them, and the dilapidated neglected aspect of the whole, are truly humiliating. And what a contrast to the visitor who has just passed Henry VII.'s Chapel! It is fortunate we can so soon forget it, and all other jarring associations: a few steps -and we are in the Abbey, and-out of the world.

POETS' CORNER.

"Poets' Corner!"-We could wish, most heartily, we knew the name of him who first gave this appellation to the south transept of the Abbey, and thus helped, most probably, to make it what it is,—the richest little spot the earth possesses in its connection with the princes of song: such a man ought himself to have a monument among them. And, though he may have never written a line, we could almost venture to assert he must have been a kindred spirit, so exquisitely applicable is his phrase ;-so felicitously illustrative of the poet, who, with all his exhaustion of old worlds and creation of new, is generally most deeply attached to some one of the smallest corners of that on which he moves;-so characteristic is it of the personal relation in which we, his readers, stand toward him: not in the pulpit, the senate, or the academy, does he teach us, but in the quiet corner by the winter fireside, or in the green nook of the summer woods. In a word, we might have sought in vain for any other appellation that would have expressed, with equal force, the home-feeling with which we desire, however unconsciously, to invest this sumptuous abode of our dead poets, or that would have harmonised so finely with our mingled sentiments of affection and reverence for their memory.

But, though we do not know who gave the name, we are at no loss with regard to those whose burial here first suggested it. If, immediately we enter, we turn to the right, and gaze on the monuments on the wall by our side, we perceive one standing out from the rest in hoar antiquity, a fine old gothic piece of sculpture, that, though in reality not three centuries old, seems at the first glance to be coeval with the building itself; that is the tomb of Chaucer, the first poet buried in the Abbey, and the first true poet England produced. It is, in other respects, one of the most interesting memorials of the place. Caxton, who, among his numerous claims to our gratitude, adds that of having sought out and made permanent by printing the manuscript of the Canterbury Tales (one of the editions of which he published under circumstances peculiarly honourable to himself), placed the original inscription here, which he obtained from a learned Milanese. This remained till Brigham, a student in the university of Oxford, took upon him, as a labour of love, the erection of a monument to the illustrious poet's memory. The present tomb was accordingly placed

here in 1555. As we pause to gaze on its decayed and blackened front, and to examine, with an interest that finds little to repay it, the remains of the poet's effigy, a kind of melancholy similarity between the fate of Chaucer's reputation and that of his memorial suggests itself: what Spenser calls "black oblivion's rust" has been almost as injurious to the first as to the last, and has caused one of the greatest, and, as far as qualifications are concerned, most popular of poets, to be the most neglected or unknown by the large majority of his countrymen. There is a rust upon his verses, it is true, that mars, upon the whole, their original music (such as we find it breaking out at intervals where time has not played his fantastic tricks with the spelling and pronunciation), and which, for the first few hours of perusal, somewhat dims also the brilliancy of the thoughts, but that is all; he who devotes one day to studying Chaucer will be delighted the next, and on the third will look back with amazement on his ignorance of the writer who, all circumstance of time and position considered, can scarcely be said to have had yet a superior, unless it be Shakspere. Chaucer, like Shakspere, seems to have combined in himself all the qualities which are generally found to belong to different individuals. As the characters of the wonderful prologue to the Canterbury Tales throng upon the memory, one is lost in wonder at the extent and variety of the powers that could have created such a diversified assemblage. The gentle veteran knight, the young flute-playing poetical squire, the dainty prioress, the luxurious and respectable monk side by side with the licentious and vagabond friar, the merry and wanton wife of Bath, the poure parson, that sublimest of characters in the homeliest of shapes, the brawny bagpipe-playing miller, &c., &c. Chaucer died in 1400, a fact we learn only from the monument; and, like the fabled swan, he may be said to have literally died singing. Among his works we find 'A ballad made by Geoffrey Chaucer upon his death-bed, lying in his great anguish ;' a touching and memorable passage to be prefixed to a poem, and one is naturally anxious to learn the nature of the sentiments that flowed into verse under such circumstances. Such was the first poet buried in the Corner. The next was a worthy successor, Spenser, the author of the 'Faerie Queen.' If poets, in the words of Shelley, are "cradled into wrong," or begin the world with suffering-so, alas! too often do they end it. Ben Jonson thus briefly records, in his conversation with Drummond of Hawthornden, the frightful circumstances that attended the last days of England's second great poet -"The Irish having robbed Spenser's goods, and burnt his house and a little child new born, he and his wife escaped; and, after, he died for lake of bread in King Street, [Westminster,] and refused twenty pieces sent to him by my Lord of Essex, adding, 'he was sorry he had no time to spend them.'" This story sounds altogether terribly like truth; yet, as doubts have been thrown upon it, we are glad to think it possible that there may be some mistake, or at least exaggeration. This great poet had great patrons: Sir Philip Sidney, Raleigh, Essex, and Queen Elizabeth; so hunger, we may hope, was not by the poet's death-bed. Spenser was buried where he had desired to be, near his great predecessor, Chaucer (but on the other side of the entrance), in 1598-9, at the expense of the Earl of Essex. It has been recorded that several of his poetical brethren attended, who threw epitaphs, and elegies, and panegyrics on his works, into his grave, “with the pens that wrote them." "Gentle Willy" (Spenser's own designation of Shakspere) we may be tolerably sure was among these mourners. The short but beautiful inscription on the monument runs thus: "Here lies, expecting the second coming of our Saviour Christ Jesus, the body of Edmund Spenser, the prince of poets in his time, whose divine spirit needs no other witness than the works which he left behind him." This was the second inhabitant of Poets' Corner.