It is impossible to wander round the Poets' Corner without a longing¹ that the Abbey could claim as her own all the great singers and seers who have made the literature of our country. Chaucer and Spenser indeed we have, with other writers of the Elizabethan and Stuart periods; but many familiar names are missing altogether, or marked only by a bust² or slab³. John Philips, Matthew Prior, John Gay, and Thomas Campbell—these were the last poets buried in Westminster for many a long day. Shakespeare, Milton, Goldsmith, Coleridge, Burns, Keble, Wordsworth, Thackeray, Matthew Arnold, Kingsley, Ruskin, have monuments, and so we have their names; but how many a one is there for whom we look in vain in this national temple of honour. Langland, Herrick, Herbert, Sidney, Pope, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Bunyan, Sir Thomas More, Defoe, and Swift are unknown English writers so far as the Abbey is concerned.

Towards the latter end of the nineteenth century, however, there came a change. Macaulay and Grote, historians, were both buried within its walls, and when Charles Dickens died in 1870, Dean Stanley at once suggested Westminster to his family, who declined the offer. Then there appeared an article in the Times declaring that the Abbey was the one place worthy⁴ to receive so distinguished⁵ a writer. Still his family hesitated, and at last only consented on the condition that the ceremony should be entirely⁶ private. So it came to pass that, one evening after dark, when the Abbey was closed, a grave was dug in the Poets' Corner close to Thackeray's bust, and in the early summer morning the funeral took place in solitary⁷ simplicity⁸. But in a few hours the news had spread, and before the day was over thousands of persons had been to take a last look at the grave of the writer they loved, many of them the very poorest people, who yet brought with them a few flowers or some other

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