Page:Once a Week, Series 1, Volume II Dec 1859 to June 1860.pdf/608

16, 1860.] Some fine images and statues have survived the wreck wrought by iconoclasts; lovely little figures still stand among foliage of exquisite daintiness; capitals still retain their refined and delicate work; but the tall windows are blocked up with brick and stone, and the whole building betrays the neglect and ill-usage to which it has been for years subjected since it was converted into a public record office in the reign of Edward VI., and so continued until last year, when the curious collection was removed: Wills and pipe-rolls, rolls of parliament and treaties of state, the Domesday-book of the Norman, the golden bull of Clement VII. conferring the title of Defender of the Faith on Henry VIII., the resignation of the Scottish crown by John Baliol, and the exquisite seal wrought by the hands of Benvenuto Cellini, and attached to the treaty of perpetual amity signed by Bluff Hal and Francis I.

Below the Chapter-house is an undercroft—a crypt with a vault supported on a round pillar. Midway in its height the latter has a deep set aumbry for relics, cut into its very centre. There are also in the walls a water-drain, altar-recess, aumbry, and the sockets of a screen.

Once more in the Cloister; the door in the turret opposite is open, and up the winding stair we rise step by step until we stand alongside of the roof of the dormitory, which still retains two windows of the time of the Confessor. Southward rises the long north wall of the Refectory; were the windows divested of their brickwork, we might fancy the remainder of the building was yet perfect. We stoop our head, and pass under a low door into a small room with timbered partitions and plastered walls; it contains the indentures of the chapel of Henry VII., in a trunk of that period. On the other side of the compartment is the large painting of the White Hart, the badge of Richard II., and we think of his prophecy, that when that supporter was removed from the arms of England, her green fields should be crimsoned with the blood of her sons, warring one with another. We are standing in a tribune, built over the east alley of the cloister, which occupies the place of what would have been otherwise a west aisle of the south transept. Those muniment chests of oak, that quadrant-shaped cope-box, those coffers and trunks, some reaching back to the XIIIth century, contain the archives of the abbey. The cope-box is not here, but in the triforium gallery.

There, before us, is that glorious interior, the grandest of all Gothic buildings, majestic, imperturbable, sublime, beautiful as ever. The haze of grey and purple fills distant chantry and aisle, and floats through tall arches and along the gilded roofs: but on the diapered walls fall golden gleams, bars of light cast by the fast-westering sun; two lines of tapers in the choir grow momentarily brighter as we stand and gaze across the transept: and then from the white-robed choristers—the white robes gradually fading paler and paler with the waning daylight—rises the soft, low anthem in a minor key—in that voice of boys that seems with innocence to lose also its freshness and thrilling power. There is a passive inspiration in all around: the air grows thick with crowding fancies, enhanced by the indistinctness which falls shadowy and mysterious on the chanting choir, and the building that apparently dilates its vast dimensions; a sovereign anodyne for every sorrow seems to fill the very atmosphere. And then the glorious organ lifts its grand voice—broad waves of glorious music beat against the windows, shivering in every pane, as though they trembled for pleasure at those triumphant tones. Then all is still again, and—

From yonder tower

The day is tolled into eternity!

How hollow, dread, and dismal is the peal,

Now rolling up its vast account to Heaven!

Awhile it undulates, then dies away

In mutter’d echoes, like the ebbing groans

Of drowning men!

We cannot close this paper without adding a few lines in acknowledgment of the great debt which the abbey owes to Mr. G. G. Scott, who has not only exposed to view the columns of St. Catherine’s Chapel, which were formerly concealed in dustbins and coal-cellars, opened and restored the vestibule to the Chapter-house, and discovered and reopened the staircase to what once was the Dormitory, but has stereotyped a large portion of the internal surface which was fast crumbling to decay, by saturating it with an invisible resinous solution. This process has been recently applied to the Royal tombs and the whole of the wall-arcading of the more ancient parts of the church, the older triforium, and the entrance to the Chapter house; and it is intended to extend it to the rest of the building. Though much has been done in the way of preservation, and of restoration too, we fear that the spirit in which the Chapter, as a body, deal with the old monastic buildings is somewhat utilitarian, and that they are collectively too much inclined to view the remains of antiquity as a lot of rubbish which militates against the convenience of their residences and those of their officers and dependants. It is to be feared too that this utilitarian spirit may derive some encouragement from the contemplated removal of Westminster School from the precincts of the abbey to a more rural and retired spot, which would probably be followed at no distant interval by a removal also of some of the most interesting of ancient landmarks.

is not to be denied, that, under the present empire, the Parisian salons are one of the chief centres of opposition. Of all the institutions of France, the salons of the capital are those which have least wavered in the antipathy to the “Neveu de l’oncle,” as Louis Napoleon has been proverbially called. But at this I see my English readers ready to ask one question; namely, what on earth I can mean by calling the salons of Paris an “institution?”

Now, in truth, I know of no other name to give them; for they seem to me to be somewhere about the only force that is persistent and self-subsistent, and that, springing from what I can only call the moral soil of the country, has grown with the