The Cornhill Magazine

WESTMINSTER ABBEY has been called 'the most lovely and lovable thing in Christendom,' and few Englishmen will be disposed to challenge the description. The singular beauty of the fabric may justify the first adjective, but the second points to other and less material excellences. Around the fabric has slowly grown a network of associations, and these have added a spiritual beauty, which arrests the notice and secures the affection of myriads whose eyes have never gazed on the fair church itself. Westminster Abbey has had an unparalleled history, in the course of which it has gained the lovableness' which now distinguishes it from all the churches in the world, and makes it uniquely fit to be the scene of a pageant the most interesting and solemn imaginable. The Coronation would not be the same thing in any other church. St. Paul's Cathedral, for example, would be a far more convenient building for such a function, and could accommodate without difficulty at least twice as many spectators as the Abbey can squeeze in at the cost of frightful disfigurement; but no one has even suggested that the ceremony should be transferred thither. It is felt instinctively that no amount of superiority in convenience and accommodation could atone for the loss of higher things which are inseparable from Westminster Abbey. It might, indeed, have been thought that these would have gradually lost their influence as the national life outgrew the simpler conditions of medieval society, and became at once democratic and Imperial. It might have been argued, not without VOL. XIII.-NO. 73, N.S.

plausibility, that this ancient church, which seems to express in its very structure the aristocratic spirit of feudalism, which is filled with the monuments of kings and nobles, and weighted with the traditions of a thousand years, would have fallen out of touch with the eager, various life of modern Englishmen.

As a matter of fact this has not been the case. The influence of Westminster Abbey, so far from growing weaker, steadily waxes as the Empire grows. Nor are the reasons of this altogether obscure. Westminster Abbey appeals with remarkable success to the deepest sentiments of English folk, sentiments which democratic institutions and Imperial expansion have on the whole tended to strengthen.

The expansion of the Empire has coincided with a deepened sense of national oneness and national, or, perhaps, to speak more truly, racial mission. Widely scattered over the world, building up new communities of English folk in lands which have no past, our people have clung with the more devotion to the historic symbol of national unity, and given an almost religious homage to the individuals in whom the mission of the race has found expression. Westminster Abbey matches with astonishing exactitude these Imperial dispositions. The Monarchy is there exhibited, not so much in its individual aspect, as in its historic greatness. The mind is not so much impressed by the particular character and fortune of this or that monarch, as by the imposing continuity of the line of sovereigns from a remote antiquity to the present time. Impressive memorials of the past may be found in many places, and they leave their mark on the mind; but they do not come home to us as living forces of the present, with which we ourselves are concerned. Westminster Abbey is unique in presenting the Monarchy to view as a continuous factor of the national life. There is the shrine of St. Edward, and there is the coronation chair of Edward I., ready for the use of Edward VII.; and the whole period of nearly eight and a-half centuries is no blank, but visibly embodied in a great series of royal tombs, any one of which would make the fame of a church, and which taken together present the most impressive spectacle of the kind in the world. It is one of the peculiarities of Westminster Abbey that it unites the coronations with the burials of the kings of England. The frailty of the individual and the strength of the institution are shown together. Poets and moralists have naturally fastened on the pathetic suggestiveness of this combination. It would be

easy to accumulate examples from our classic poets and divines, but we will confine ourselves to some lines from one whose antiquarian zeal placed all lovers of the Abbey under heavy obligations, and may be pleaded as an excuse for the pedantic detail of the verse, if not also for the triteness of the moral. Dart prefaces his 'Westmonasterium' with a lengthy poem, from which we cull the following lines, in which he addresses the monarchs as they come to be crowned. A certain interest attaches to his description of the ceremony:

Ye sons of Empire, who in pompous hour
Attend to wear the cumb'rous robes of pow'r;
When you proceed along the crowded way,
Think, there's a second visit still to pay:
Now purple pride and shouting joy appears;
Then black procession and attending tears.
And when in state on buried kings you tread,
And swelling robes sweep spreading o'er the dead;
While, like a god, you cast your eyes around,
Think then, O think! you walk on treach'rous ground.
Tho' firm the chequer'd pavement seems to be,
"Twill surely open and give way to thee.
And while the crowding Lords address them near,
Th' anointing prelate and the kneeling peer;
While with obsequious diligence they bow,
And spread the careful honours o'er thy brow:
While the high-rais'd spectators shout around,
And the long isles and vaulted roofs resound:
Then snatch a sudden thought, and turn thy head
From the loud living to the silent dead.

The antiquity of the nation, symbolised by a Monarchy which has continued through ages, appeals to the national imagination and stirs the national pride. Of all forms of human vanity, pride of ancestry is, perhaps, the most pardonable, and the monarchical sentiment is really pride of national ancestry. English folk, confronted by bustling modern communities, which are always rivals, and sometimes even successful rivals, in the competition of peoples, set store by a national past which distinguishes them honourably from the rest of the world. They are the aristocrats of Western civilisation. France has broken with its history, and forfeited its public dignity. The German Empire and the kingdom of Italy are creations of yesterday. England had been famous for centuries before an Emperor of Russia existed. The great Republic of the West is a late offshoot of England. The Monarchy is the outward and visible sign of English superiority over neigh

bours and rivals in the matter of national ancestry. And this symbolic character is immensely enhanced by the fact that our sovereigns reign by a hereditary title. The deep family sentiment of the Teutonic race is enlisted on the side of the English Monarchy. Few of our oldest families trace their pedigree far into the Middle Ages; for the most part the peerage is very modern in origin; but the King comes of a family which was ancient when the Confessor was borne to his grave more than eight centuries ago. We instinctively revere lineage so exalted and so ancient. The King stands above the rest of Englishmen by a title of which the validity is obvious to everyone who has an ancestor to boast of. His family is coeval with England, and the most famous names in the national record are those of his ancestors. This fact also comes into prominence when the heir of so many kings enters Westminster Abbey to receive his crown amid the memorials of his kindred. The identification of the Monarchy with the nation is complete; and the loyalty which leaps into enthusiasm at a coronation is no unnatural or unworthy sentiment.

Sentiment allies itself with more prosaic considerations to exalt the Monarchy, and thereby to increase the veneration which Englishmen cherish for the famous church in which the Monarchy is illustrated and expressed. Political students are agreed that the last half-century has witnessed a remarkable resurrection of monarchical feeling throughout the Western world. It is scarcely excessive to say that civilised opinion has undergone a complete reversal in the course of a century. Kings were the objects of criticism a hundred years ago, and men speculated freely as to their final disappearance; now suspicion attaches mainly to democratic institutions, and the paralysis of Parliament is a familiar subject of popular comment. The Monarchy is certainly the most popular, perhaps also the strongest, of English political institutions. The faults of its rivals have contributed hardly less than its own merits to this fact. The disappointing results of republican systems on the Continent and, to some extent, in America have wonderfully chastened the logic of political philosophers, and the abstract arguments which fascinated our grandfathers sound in our ears a trifle absurd. After revolution and reform there has been a conservative reaction in favour of monarchy. In their dismay at the disintegrating tendencies of democracy, thoughtful citizens cling with the more ardour to the one political factor of

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