Why Covent Garden? Because it was the garden, not for the sale but for the culture of vegetables, belonging to the Convent: that is, the Abbey of Westminster. Why Chelsea? Because the river used to cast up a "chesel" of sand and pebbles. Selsey in Sussex is the same word. Why Cheapside? Because at the east end of it was a market place called Cheaping. Why the Hummums? Merely a Londonisation of Hammam, or Turkish Bath, which it was before it became an hotel. Why the Isle of Dogs? Because when Greenwich was a royal resort the kennels were here. Why the Strand? Because it was on the shore of the Thames. Why Bayswater? Because one of William the Conqueror's officers, Bainardus of Normandy, became possessed of the land hereabout (as of Baynard's Castle in Sussex) and one of his fields at Paddington was called Baynard's Water, or Watering. Why Pall Mall? Because the old game of Pall Mall was played there. Why Birdcage Walk? Because Charles II had an aviary there. Why Storey's Gate? Because Edward Storey, keeper of the aviary, lived hard by. Why Millbank? Because a water mill stood where St. Peter's wharf now is turned by the stream that ran through the Abbey orchard (the Abbey orchard !) down Great College Street. This was one of the streams that made Thorney Island, on which Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament stand. It is an island no longer, because the streams which divided it from the main land have been dammed and built over; but an island it was, its enisling waters being the Mill Bank stream, the Thames, a brook which ran down Gardiner's Lane, and, on the east, the Long Ditch in Prince's Street. Why was Westminster so called? Because St. Paul's was the parent and the Abbey was its western dependency the west minster.

And here, by way of Dean's Yard, we enter the Abbey, which really needs a volume to itself. Indeed the more I think about it the more reluctant my pen is to behave at all. An old children's book which I happen to have been glancing at this morning, called "Instructive Rambles in London and the adjacent Villages, 1800," puts the case in a nutshell. "On entering the Abbey the grandeur and solemnity of the whole struck them forcibly; and Charles, addressing his father, said, 'By the little I already see, sir, I should think that instead of a single morning it would take many days, nay even weeks, to explore and examine into all the curious antiquities of this building."' His father agreed with him, and so do I. Equally true is it that it would take many weeks to record one's impressions. To say nothing would perhaps be better: merely to remark "And here we enter the Abbey" and pass on. But I must, I think, say a little.

So much has it been restored, and so crowded is it (to the exclusion of long views), that one may say that the interest of the more public part of the Abbey resides rather in its associations with the dead than in its architecture. To see it as a thing of beauty one must go east of the altar to the exquisite chapel of Henry VII. The Abbey proper has nothing to show so beautiful as this, grave and vast and impressive as it is ; but even with this its real wonderfulness comes from its dead. For if we except the great soldiers and sailors and painters who lie at St. Paul's, and the great poet at Stratford-on-Avon, almost all that is most august and illustrious in English history and literature reposes here.

Entering by the north transept you come instantly upon the great statesmen, the monument to Chatham, at first only a white blur in the dim religious light, being so close to the door. Palmerston, Canning and Gladstone are near by. The younger Pitt and Fox lie here too, but their monuments are elsewhere. We have seen so many of Fox's London residences: this is the last. Beneath the north aisle of the nave lie also men of science Newton and Darwin and Herschel. In the south aisle of the nave are the graves or monuments of various generals and governors, Kneller,' the painter, Isaac Watts, who wrote the hymns, John and Charles Wesley and Major Andre.

Poets' Corner, which is a portion of the south transept, loses something of its impressiveness by being such a huddle and also by reason of certain trespassers there: a fault due to lax standards of taste in the past. Had it been realised that the space of Westminster Abbey was limited, the right of burial there would long ago have been recognised as too high an honour to be given indiscriminately to all to whom the label of poet was applied. We now use the word with more care. The Rev. William Mason and Nicholas Rowe, John Phillips and St. Evremond, even Gay and Prior, strike one in the light of interlopers. Only by dying when they did could they have found their way hither. And certain of the monuments are far too large, particularly that to John, Duke of Argyll and Greenwich, by the exuberant Roubilliac, no matter how Canova may have admired it. The plain slabs that cover Johnson and Dickens, Browning and Tennyson, are more to one's liking; or such simple medallions as that to Jenny Lind. Shakespeare and Milton are only commemorated here ; but Chaucer and Spenser, Jonson ("O rare Ben Jonson" runs his epitaph) and Dryden, Gray and Cowley all these and many others lie at Westminster. Ben Jonson was buried standing, near the north wall of the nave, in eighteen inches of ground square. His inscription cost eighteen-pence. But the grave of the Unknown Soldier has relegated, in the interest and pathos, all these tombs to a second place.

So far all has been free; but the choir is not free (except on Mondays), and you must be conducted there officially. The Abbey guides are good and not impatient men, with quite enough history for ordinary purposes and an amusing pride in their powers of elocution. They lead their little flock from chapel to chapel, like shepherds in the East, treading as familiarly among the dust of kings as if it were the open street.

The first chapel, St. Benedict's, has only one queen, and she a poor unhappy slighted creature Anne of Cleves ; the second chapel, St. Edmund's, has none, the Jane Seymour that lies here being the daughter of the Protector Somerset. Yet here are many noble bodies, notably the Earl and Countess of Shrewsbury; and Eleanor de Bohun beneath a fine brass ; and the little sister and brother of the Black Prince, with tiny alabaster figures of themselves atop, who died as long ago as 1340. Here also, a modern among these medievalists, lies the author of "Zanoni" and "My Novel." A Crusader by the doorway testifies to the old laxity of rules regarding visitors, for he is cut all over with names and initials and dates just as the backs of the figures in the Laocoon group beneath the Vatican are scribbled by Italian sightseers. How many persons know who it was that first scratched his initials on an Abbey tomb? Of all men, Izaak Walton, who cut his monogram on Casaubon's stone in the south transept in 1658.

The next chapel, St. Nicholas's, is the burial place of the Percys, a family which still has the right to lie here. Here also are the parents of the great Duke of Buckingham, in marble on the lid of their tomb, and in dust below it ; and here lies the great Burleigh. Both this chapel and that of St. Edmund call for, coloured glass.

We come now to the south aisle of Henry VII's chapel and get a foretaste of the glories of that shrine. A very piteous queen lies here, Mary Queen of Scots, brought hither from Peterboro' by her son James I, and placed within this tomb. Charles the Second lies here also, and William and Mary and Anne and General Monk, and here is a beautiful bronze of the mother of Henry VII. In the north aisle is dust still more august, for here is the tomb of Elizabeth, erected by James I with splendid impartiality. Her sister, Queen Mary, lies here too, but the guide is himself more interested, and takes care that you are more interested, in the marble cradle containing the marble figure of the little Sophia, the three-day-old daughter of James I; in the tomb of the little Lady Mary; and in the casket containing the remains of the murdered princes, brought hither from the Tower. A slab in the floor marks the grave of Joseph Addison, the creator of Sir Roger de Coverlet', who wrote in the "Spectator" a passage on the Abbey and its mighty dead which should be in every one's mind as they pass from chapel to chapel of this wonderful choir.

And so we come to the Abbey's most beautiful part Henry VII's chapel, which is London's Sainte Chapelle. It is perhaps the most beautiful chapel in England, and beyond question the most wonderful, since not only is it an architectural jewel but it holds the dust of some of our greatest monarchs. If Henry VII had done nothing else he would live by this. Woodwork and stonework are alike marvellous, but the ceiling is the extraordinary thing as light almost as lace, and as delicate. Not the least beautiful things here are the two stone pillars supporting the altar above the grave of Edward VI. Henry VII's tomb is in the chantry at the back of the altar, and in the same vault lies James I. George II and the Guelphs who are buried here have no monuments, but the blackguard Duke of Buckingham whom Fenton stabbed is celebrated by one of the most ambitious tombs in the Abbey, with every circumstance of artificial glory and a row of children to pray for him and women to weep. The Duke of Richmond, another friend of James I, is hardly less floridly commemorated close to the tomb of Dean Stanley.

A slab in the next chapel or bay marks the grave where Cromwell lay. After the Restoration, however, when the country entered upon a new age of gold under Charles II, one of the first duties of the Londoner was to remove the Protector's body and treat it as of course it so richly deserved. It was therefore decapitated: the trunk was thrown into a pit at Tyburn and the head was set up on Westminster Hall so firmly that it was more than twenty years before it fell during a high wind. Charles the Second having reigned quite long enough, it was perhaps felt that justice had been done; so the skull was not returned to its pinnacle but allowed to pass into reverent keeping. Cromwell's statue may now he seen, with a lion at his feet, in the shadow of Westminster Hall. The wheel has come full circle: he is there.

Compared with the chapel of Edward the Confessor behind the high altar, to which we now come, that of Henry VII is in age a mere child. Here we pass at once to the thirteenth century, Edward I being the ruling spirit. His tomb is here the largest and plainest in the Abbey; and here lies his wife Eleanor, for whom the Crosses were built one of the prettiest thoughts that a King ever had a cross at every place where her body rested on its way from the North to London, Charing's Cross being the last. Edward the Confessor lies in the shrine in the midst : Henry V in that to the north of it, and preserved above are the saddle, the sword and helmet that he used at Agincourt. But popular interest in this chapel centres in the coronation chair that is kept here, in which every king and queen has sat since Edward I.