the earliest example of the interment of sovereigns, not only within the walls of a city, but within a sacred building, when he and his successors were laid in the Church of the Apostles at Constantinople. This precedent was from that time followed both in East and West, and every European nation has now its royal consecrated cemetery.

But there are two peculiarities in Westminster which are hardly found elsewhere. The first is that it unites the Coronations with the Burials. The nearest approach to this is in Poland and Russia. In the Cathedral of Cracow, by the shrine of St. Stanislaus-the Becket of the Sclavonic races -the Kings of Poland were crowned and buried, from the thirteenth century to the dissolution of the kingdom. In the Kremlin at Moscow stand side by side the three cathedrals of the Assumption, of the Annunciation, and of the Archangel. In the first the Czars are crowned; in the second they are married; and in the third, till the accession of Peter, they were buried. Only three royal marriages have taken place in the Abbey-those of Henry III., of Richard II., and of Henry VII. But its first coronation, as we have seen, sprang out of its first royal grave. Its subsequent burials are the result of both. So Waller finely sang :

That antique pile behold,

Where royal heads receive the sacred gold:

It gives them crowns, and does their ashes keep,
There made like gods, like mortals there they sleep;
Making the circle of their reign complete,
These suns of empire, where they rise they set.

So Jeremy Taylor 5 preached:

Where our kings are crowned, their ancestors lie interred, and they must walk over their grandsire's head to take his crown. There is an acre sown with royal seed, the copy of the greatest change, from rich to naked, from ceiled roofs to arched coffins, from living like gods to die like men. . . . There the warlike and the peaceful, the fortunate and the miserable, the beloved and the despised princes mingle their dust, and pay down their symbol of mortality, and tell all the world that, when we die, our ashes shall be equal to kings, and our accounts easier, and our pains for our crimes shall be less.

So, before Waller and Jeremy Taylor, had spoken Francis Beaumont: 6

Mortality, behold and fear!

What a change of flesh is here :
Think how many royal bones

Sleep within these heaps of stones:

Here they lye, had realms and lands,

Who now want strength to stir their hands.
Here, from their pulpits seal'd with dust,
They preach, "In greatness is no trust!"
Here's an acre, sown indeed

With the richest royallest seed,

That the earth did e'er drink in,

Since the first man dy'd for sin.

Here the bones of birth have cry'd,

"Though gods they were, as men they dy'd.”

Here are sands, ignoble things,

Dropt from the ruin'd sides of kings.

Here's a world of pomp and state,

Buried in dust, once dead by fate.

The royal sepultures of Westminster were also remarkable from their connexion not only with the

coronation, but with the residence of the English Princes. The burial-places which, in this respect, the Abbey most resembles, were those of the Kings of Spain and the Kings of Scotland. "In the Escurial, where the Spanish princes live in greatness and power, and decree war or peace, they have wisely placed a cemetery, where their ashes and their glory shall sleep till time shall be no more." The like may be said of Dumfermline and of Holyrood, where the sepulchral Abbey and the Royal Palace are as contiguous as at Westminster. There has, however, been a constant tendency to separate the two. The Escurial is now almost as desolate as the stony wilderness of which it forms a part. The vault of the House of Hapsburg, in the Capuchin Church at Vienna, is far removed from the Imperial Palace.

The royal race of Savoy rests on the steep heights of St. Michael and of the Superga. The early kings of Ireland reposed in the now-deserted mounds of Clonmacnoise, by the lonely windings of the Shannon, as the early kings of Scotland on the distant and sea-girt rock of Iona. The kings of France not only were not crowned at St. Denys, but they never lived there -never came there. The town was a city of convents. Louis XIV. chose Versailles for his residence, because from the terrace of St. Germains he could still see the hated towers of the Abbey where he would be laid. But the kings of England never seemed to have feared the sight of death. The Anglo-Saxon kings had for the most part been buried at Winchester, where they were crowned,

and where they lived. The English kings, as soon as they became truly English, were crowned, and lived, and died, for many generations, at Westminster; and, even since they have been interred. elsewhere, it is still under the shadow of their grandest royal residence, in St. George's Chapel, or in the precincts of Windsor Castle. Their graves, like their thrones, were in the midst of their own life and of the life of their people.

A. P. Stanley.

III.

THE SONG OF CALLICLES.1

THROUGH the black, rushing smoke-bursts,
Thick breaks the red flame;

All Etna heaves fiercely

Her forest-clothed frame.

Not here, O Apollo !

Are haunts meet for thee.

But, where Helicon breaks down

In cliff to the sea,

Where the moon-silver'd inlets

Send far their light voice
Up the still vale of Thisbe-
O speed, and rejoice!

On the sward at the cliff-top
Lie strewn the white flocks;
On the cliff-side the pigeons
Roost deep in the rocks.

In the moonlight the shepherds,
Soft lull'd by the rills,

Lie wrapt in their blankets
Asleep on the hills.

-What forms are these coming
So white through the gloom?
What garments out-glistening
The gold-flowered broom?

What sweet-breathing presence
Out-perfumes the thyme?
What voices enrapture
The night's balmy prime?—

'Tis Apollo comes leading

His choir, the Nine.

The leader is fairest,

But all are divine.

They are lost in the hollows!

They stream up again!

What seeks on this mountain

The glorified train ?—

They bathe on this mountain,
In the spring by their road;
Then on to Olympus,

Their endless abode.

-Whose praise do they mention?

Of what is it told?

What will be for ever;

What was from of old.