Westminster Abbey | Page 9

committee of
taste appointed to assist the Chapter were of some use here, for by their
advice the Dean moved one or two monuments from the centre to the
wall, and the iron railings in front of all of them were taken away. Dean
Stanley, more than a century later, curtailed some of the most
aggressive memorials, but none have been removed, for there would be
no end to such a difficult undertaking, and in any case the ancient
arcading was already ruined.
Thus we start on our pilgrimage with some idea of the shape and the
history of the church which lies before us. First let us look into the
baptistery called Little Poets' Corner, where Wordsworth's seated statue
and some memorials of literary men are to be seen, such as the great
teacher, Dr. Arnold, who is close to his gifted son Matthew, in the
company of three notable divines, Maurice, Kingsley, and Keble. The
entrance is blocked by two huge eighteenth-century erections, the one
to Cornewall, a valiant sea-captain, put up by Parliament, the other to
Craggs, a young statesman, whose posthumous fame was sullied by his
share in the South Sea Bubble. The elder Craggs committed suicide {29}
when the Bubble burst, but the son died first, and Pope wrote a wordy
epitaph and superintended the erection of the monument. From this side
we turn to the other tower, but make no exhaustive survey of the "Whig
Corner," for statesmen galore are to be found in the north transept, and
we mention the chief of these in connection with their contemporaries
there. The latest name here is that of General Charles Gordon, a bronze
given by the Royal Engineers seven years after the fall of Khartoum,
but before the fall of the Mahdi wiped out England's dishonour. It is not
likely that a Chinaman has joined our party; were one with us we
would point out Gordon's services to the Chinese government and the
honours he received from the Emperor. There is only one other
memorial connected with China (in the north choir aisle), put up a
century ago to Sir George Staunton, who went as Secretary on our first
embassy to China. His son, a boy of eleven, accompanied him, and
actually learned enough Chinese on the voyage to interpret for the party;
he afterwards became a learned Chinese scholar. We linger yet a
moment to point out one of the few German names in the Abbey,

William Horneck, whose father, a Westminster Prebendary, was a
German {30} by birth; he was himself one of the earliest of our
Engineers, and won honour in the Duke of Marlborough's campaigns.
When we reach the south transept we shall see a more familiar German
name on the bust of Grabe, the well-known Oriental scholar.
We pass out now by the statue of a modern philanthropist, Lord
Shaftesbury, who fought as energetically for the freedom of the white
slave as did Zachary Macaulay, whose tablet is behind us in the tower,
for that of the black. Shaftesbury's efforts on behalf of the overworked
women and of the children in mines and factories will never be
forgotten, nor is the distinguished statesman Charles James Fox, whose
connection with the abolition of slavery is marked by the tasteless
monument before our eyes, in any danger of oblivion. The life-size
group represents Fox's dying agony in the arms of Liberty; a negro
slave is kneeling at his feet.
If there be any one interested in astronomy amongst us, he should turn
round to the tablet at the extreme west end, which commemorates
young Benjamin Horrocks, the first observer of the transit of Venus in
1639, who was praised by Sir John Herschel as the pride and boast of
modern {31} astronomy. Herschel's own bust is on the north wall; he
lies side by side with Charles Darwin, near the iron gate. We now leave
the west end and progress up the centre of the nave, noticing on our
way eastward the old wooden pulpit, which has been brought here from
Henry VII.'s Chapel and replaces a heavy marble one given in Dean
Trench's time to commemorate the opening of the nave for evening
services. Trench himself passed from Westminster, as Archbishop of
Dublin, to Ireland, his native country, whither the pulpit has gone, but
his body was brought back to England, and his grave is beneath our feet.
Behind it the name of the American philanthropist, George Peabody,
whose mortal remains rested in the Abbey for a few days only, reminds
all Londoners of the original Peabody buildings, the first working-class
dwellings on the block system, which were founded by him and called
after his name.
A few steps further and we stand above the grave of David Livingstone,

another ardent worker for