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General SummaryThe essays which Joseph Addison wrote for the Spectator, a journal to which he and his friend Richard Steele were the principal contributors, have always since their publication been considered to be models of a pure English style. Their place in literature is secure. Historically, also, they have much value as a picture of English life and manners in the opening years of the eighteenth century, before the industrial, commercial, and political revolutions of that century had begun to make over the modern world. The essays here reproduced were all published between 1711#8211;1712.
CHAPTER XV
The England of Addison1
73. Westminster Abbey2
When I am in a serious humor, I very often walk by myself in
Westminster Abbey; where the gloominess of the place, and the
use to which it is applied, with the solemnity of the building,
and the condition of the people who lie in it, are apt to fill the
mind with a kind of melancholy, or rather thoughtfulness, that
is not disagreeable. I yesterday passed a whole afternoon in
the churchyard, the cloisters, and the church, amusing myself
with the tombstones and inscriptions that I met with in those
several regions of the dead. Most of them recorded nothing
else of the buried person, but that he was born upon one day and
died upon another: the whole history of his life being comprehended
in those two circumstances that are common to all mankind.
I could not but look upon these registers of existence,
whether of brass or marble, as a kind of satire upon the departed
persons; who had left no other memorial of them but that they
were born and that they died. . . . The life of these men is
finely described in Holy Writ by "the path of an arrow," which
is immediately closed up and lost.
Upon my going into the church, I entertained myself with the
digging of a grave; and saw in every shovelful of it that was
thrown up, the fragment of a bone or skull intermixed with a kind
of fresh moldering earth, that some time or other had a place in
the composition of an human body. Upon this, I began to consider
with myself what innumerable multitudes of people lay
confused together under the pavement of that ancient cathedral;
how men and women, friends and enemies, priests and soldiers,
monks and prebendaries, were crumbled amongst one another
and blended together in the same common mass; how beauty,
strength, and youth, with old age, weakness, and deformity,
lay undistinguished in the same promiscuous heap of matter.
After having thus surveyed this great magazine of mortality,
as it were, in the lump, I examined it more particularly by the
accounts which I found on several of the monuments which are
raised in every quarter of that ancient fabric. Some of them
were covered with such extravagant epitaphs, that, if it were
possible for the dead person to be acquainted with them, he
would blush at the praises which his friends have bestowed upon
him. There are others so excessively modest, that they deliver
the character of the person departed in Greek or Hebrew, and
by that means are not understood once in a twelvemonth. In
the poetical quarter I found there were poets who had no monuments,
and monuments which had no poets. I observed,
indeed, that the present war1 had filled the church with many
of the uninhabited monuments, which had been erected to the
memory of persons whose bodies were perhaps buried in the
plains of Blenheim2 or in the bosom of the ocean. . . .
I know that entertainments of this nature are apt to raise
dark and dismal thoughts in timorous minds and gloomy imaginations;
but for my own part, though I am always serious, I
do not know what it is to be melancholy; and can therefore
take a view of nature in her deep and solemn scenes, with the
same pleasure as in her most gay and delightful ones. By this
means I can improve myself with those objects which others
consider with terror. When I look upon the tombs of the great,
every emotion of envy dies in me; when I read the epitaphs of
the beautiful, every inordinate desire goes out; when I meet
with the grief of parents upon a tombstone, my heart melts with
compassion; when I see the tomb of the parents themselves, I
consider the vanity of grieving for those whom we must quickly
follow; when I see kings lying by those who deposed them, when
I consider rival wits placed side by side or the holy men that
divided the world with their contest and disputes, I reflect
with sorrow and astonishment on the little competitions, factions,
and debates of mankind. When I read the several dates of
the tombs, of some that died yesterday, and some six hundred
years ago, I consider that great day when we shall all of us be
contemporaries and make our appearance together.
1 , edited by Sir J. G. Frazer. 2 vols. London, 1915.
Macmillan and Company, Ltd.
2 Addison, , vol. 1, pp. 203#8211;207.
1 The War of the Spanish Succession.
2 Scene of the defeat in 1704 of the French and Bavarians by the English and
Austrians, the latter under the command of Marlborough and Prince Eugène.
Contents:
Chicago: Sir J. G. Frazer, ed., "Westminster Abbey," Essays in Readings in Modern European History, ed. Webster, Hutton (Boston: D.C. Heath, 1926), 158–159. Original Sources, accessed November 23, 2024, http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=8AJMENDB217UJAM.
MLA: . "Westminster Abbey." Essays, edited by Sir J. G. Frazer, Vol. 1, in Readings in Modern European History, edited by Webster, Hutton, Boston, D.C. Heath, 1926, pp. 158–159. Original Sources. 23 Nov. 2024. http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=8AJMENDB217UJAM.
Harvard: (ed.), 'Westminster Abbey' in Essays. cited in 1926, Readings in Modern European History, ed. , D.C. Heath, Boston, pp.158–159. Original Sources, retrieved 23 November 2024, from http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=8AJMENDB217UJAM.
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