Page:Once a Week, Series 1, Volume II Dec 1859 to June 1860.pdf/604

16, 1860.] witnessing the most heroic acts! May this good fight go on year by year, and may the date 1870 so give us the mastery over Nature that we shall not have to record in that year, as during the last, that 1645 sailors have been drowned upon our coasts. A. W.

new about Westminster Abbey! What, after the library of books that have been written, from the account of Keepe to the “Minsters of England,” published by Stanford in this year of grace 1860, can there possibly be anything new said? Even so; under the shadow of the old Abbey are “things not generally known,” and certainly inaccessible to the general public. Let us try, as well as we are able, with the means of pen and ink, to give a sketch of this terra incognita to our readers. We shall simply detail, with one exception hereafter to be noticed, the aspect of places which we have actually seen and traversed—buildings of the time of the Confessor, remnants of a larger pile eight centuries old.

Few persons, as they cross the Broad Sanctuary or Palace Yard, or take their way to St. John’s Square—mayhap to trace the house in which D’Israeli’s Sybil counted the hours tolled by the clock of that extraordinary piece of barbaric magnificence, the church which fills the centre of the enclosure—can reproduce to their mind’s eye the ancient grandeur of that superb abbey, its accessory buildings, and ample precinct. Allow us to recall the scene. To the south of King Street stood the northern gateway of the abbey, a double prison-gate, with doors opening westward and southward—the Bishop of London’s prison for refractory clerks, and subsequently of John Selden, Sir Walter Raleigh, jovial Pepys, and Colonel Richard Lovelace, who sung here that glorious strain within his gloomy cell,—

Stone walls do not a prison make,

Nor iron bars a cage;

Minds innocent and quiet take

That for a hermitage.

On the site of the present Sessions House was the detached belfry tower of the abbey, like that now to be seen near Chichester Cathedral, and adjoining it stood the chapel of the Sanctuary, the Alsatia of the west of London, and the birthplace of the unhappy Edward V., from which he was consigned to a more fatal durance in the Tower. Westward, where the new hotel is rapidly approaching completion, was the Almonry, in which Caxton first practised his immortal art—a site deserving a national commemoration. Fronting the gateway was a bridge, first built by “good Queen Maud,” across the arm of the Thames that moated Thorney Island, at the head of Tothill-street. Westward and southward the walls bent round along the modern Dean and College streets; to the south of the latter were the bowling-green, with the hooded gamesters busy at their sport; the Abbat’s pleasaunce with its sweet flowers and