It is a relief to meet the friendly
bourgeois eye of good Queen Anne. It has restored my common sense.
`These figures really are most curious, most interesting...' and anon
I am asking intelligent questions about the contents of a big press,
which, by special favour, has been unlocked for me.
Perhaps the most romantic thing in the Islip Chapel is this press.
Herein, huddled one against another in dark recesses, lie the battered
and disjected remains of the earlier effigies--the primitive wooden
ones. Edward I. and Eleanor are known to be among them; and Henry VII.
and Elizabeth of York; and others not less illustrious. Which is
which? By size and shape you can distinguish the men from the women;
but beyond that is mere guesswork, be you never so expert. Time has
broken and shuffled these erst so significant effigies till they have
become as unmeaning for us as the bones in one of the old plague-pits.
I feel that I ought to be more deeply moved than I am by this sad
state of things. But I seem to have exhausted my capacity for
sentiment; and I cannot rise to the level of my opportunity. Would
that I were Thackeray! Dear gentleman, how promptly and copiously he
would have wept and moralised here, in his grandest manner, with that
perfect technical mastery which makes even now his tritest and
shallowest sermons sound remarkable, his hollowest sentiment ring
true! What a pity he never came to beat the muffled drum, on which he
was so supreme a performer, around the Islip Chapel! As I make my way
down the stairs, I am trying to imagine what would have been the
cadence of the final sentence in this essay by Thackeray.
Pages:
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210