30 WESTMINSTER ABBEY AND ITS MONUMENTS. 
viz.: to have no more monuments in the Abbey, or, at any rate, 
only such as public opinion may insist upon, and to make room 
for such by removing some that may be considered unworthy of 
their position. For the due commemoration of others another 
place must be found, and I am not at all sure that for the 
majority of them it is necessary that the place should be a conse- 
crated church. Certainly of some of those to whom memorials 
have been put up of late years—the late Matthew Arnold for 
example—it cannot be said that churchmanship was their distin- 
guishing characteristic. And though, doubtless, a monument in 
Westminster Abbey is a great honour, it does not follow that the 
absence of such a monument must be counted a dishonour. You 
will search in vain there for memorials of Simon de Montfort, the 
Black Prince, Oliver Cromwell, John Pym, Sir Robert Walpole, 
Edmund Burke, Robert Clive, Lord Brougham, John Bright, 
John Stuart Mill, Drake, Blake, Nelson, and Wellington, Caxton, 
More, Wren, Hogarth, Reynolds, Dr. Johnson, Pope, Byron, 
Scott, Dickens, Tennyson, and Bishop Wilberforce. The last 
strikes me as a very singular omission, inasmuch as at one time 
he was Dean of the Abbey. Of course, some of these are buried 
here, but without monuments. Others have monuments at St. 
Paul’s ; but, be that as it may, I fancy the list will justify me in 
saying that no man’s friends can feel that his memory is dis- 
honoured because he has no monument in Westminster Abbey, 
seeing what distinguished society he can keep amongst the 
outcasts. 
To conclude, I have explained to you the difficulty, and 
confessed my inability to point the way out of it. Let me try my 
hand at consolation. Things might be worse. We complain that 
there are no empty niches in our temple for monuments to our 
heroes. Let us be thankful that we cannot say we have niches 
that must be left empty because we have no heroes worthy of 
monuments. In Westminster Abbey ‘‘we are encompassed 
about with a great cloud of witnesses” to the prudence, the 
pluck, and the patriotism of our forefathers. We can be thankful 
that our own age has produced many a hero worthy to be laid 
