Westminster Abbey | Page 4

the florid
mass; what further changes the future has in store no man can prophesy.
But at present churchmen of all shades of religious feeling may
worship in this church with no extreme ritual to disturb their minds,
and at the same time with none of that irreverent and jarring
carelessness in the ordering of the services which vexed the souls of
many in the days long ago, before any of the present generation were

born. On one festival in the year, the Translation of St. Edward the
Confessor, the 13th of October, Roman Catholics return in
ever-increasing numbers to the West Minster, which was once their
own, and pilgrims may be seen kneeling round the shrine, offering their
devotions to the saint. On this historic day the Abbey clergy, mindful
also of the founder's memory, keep his feast at their own service in the
choir, by a sermon preached in his honour, Protestants and Catholics
thus uniting in a common homage to the memory of the sainted English
king.
There are several points of view whence the group of buildings formed
by the Abbey, St. Margaret's Church, Westminster Hall, and the Houses
of Parliament, can be seen above the {10} roofs of the houses, or
without any intervening obstruction. The foreigner who arrives at
Charing Cross first sees Westminster from the railway bridge, and gets
another and a nearer aspect as he reaches the bottom of Whitehall. Now
that passenger-steamers ply once again upon the river, many persons
are familiar with the unrivalled water approach, but no longer does the
wayfarer coming from the south or east hire a boat from the Lambeth
side, and thus follow the traditional route taken by St. Peter, when he
came to consecrate the original church on Thorneye. Although the
Roman road, which led from north to south of England, and crossed the
river here, is entirely lost sight of in London, the intending visitor will
be well advised if he walk to the Abbey by the parks. From the bridge
over the Serpentine he gets a distant view, and all the way, by Green
Park and St. James's, there are glimpses of the Westminster Towers. At
present, in the temporary absence of any building where the old
aquarium used to be, he has but to cross Birdcage Walk, take the old
Cockpit passage into Queen Anne's Gate, and from Dartmouth Street,
just across the way, he will see a magnificent view of the Abbey
Church with her small daughter, St Margaret, by her side. {11} As he
approaches nearer, down Tothill Street, the ugly Western Towers,
which we owe in the first instance to Wren's incapacity to understand
Gothic architecture, in the second to his successor Hawkesmore's want
of taste in the execution, become too prominent.
* * * * * *

[Illustration: View of the Abbey and St. Margaret's Church from
Whitehall]
* * * *
GENERAL VIEW OF THE ABBEY FROM WHITEHALL
The traveller who approaches Westminster from this direction has a
fine view of the whole extent of the Abbey from east to west. St.
Margaret's Church, while it certainly somewhat hides the more ancient
building, adds to the impression of size. The statues of statesmen on the
green in front prepare the minds of those who enter the north transept
by the triple doorway, which we have already seen in the frontispiece,
for the galaxy of politicians within, and when we stand beneath the
lantern we can realise the plan of the whole far better after this general
view than we could if we had entered immediately by the west door at
the farther end.
* * * * * *
Below the offending towers is the west front, which was finished as far
as the roof in the first years of Henry VII.'s reign, under those two
indefatigable abbots, Esteney and Islip. Tudor badges are visible in the
last bays of the nave vaulting: the great west window with its fine
Perpendicular tracery probably belongs to Esteney's time (the last few
years of the fifteenth century); and to Islip, who is often credited with
the whole, we now attribute only the finishing touches which
completed the west end. Henry and Islip were so beguiled by their
fascinating plans for a new chapel at the east end, that they could spare
neither money nor attention to the fact that towers were a practical
artistic necessity at the west, and those begun by Islip were left
unfinished for two centuries, when Wren took the matter up. A central
tower was also contemplated by Islip, who never carried out his project.
Wren went so far as to design one, but the apparently massive
thirteenth-century {12} piers were found too weak to support its weight,
and the idea had to be abandoned. Outside