Where Great Men Sleep page 2

Turning now eastward, we find that among famous Elizabethans who lay in Old S. Paul's were William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke; Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper and father of his greater son Francis; Sir Philip Sidney, courtier, soldier and poet; Sir Christopher Hatton, Lord Chancellor; Francis Walsingham, sagest, after Lord Burghley, of the queen's counsellors; and Dr. Donne, the famous Dean and "metaphysical" poet, whose remains and monument are preserved in Wren's church.

Sir Christopher himself reposes in the extreme east of the crypt; and such famous artists are interred there as Reynolds, Lawrence, Turner, Landseer, Cruikshank, Lord Leighton and Millais. But others equally famous are buried elsewhere, Gainsborough in Kew churchyard; Constable and Du Maurier in Hampstead parish churchyard; Romney in his native Dalton-in-Furness, Lancashire; Raeburn in the " dormitory " of the episcopal church of S. John's, Princes Street, Edinburgh; Rossetti at Birchington, near Margate, in a tomb made for him by his friend Ford Madox Brown; and G. F. Watts at Compton, Surrey. S. Paul's, however, impresses not only as dominating the neighbourhood seen from Cannon Street or Ludgate Hill, and the landscape viewed from the Northern Heights, but as containing the graves and monuments of our two most famous warriors, Admiral Nelson and the Duke of Wellington, as well as the memorials erected to all our greater eighteenth - century naval captains. Few of them save Nelson and Collingwood are buried there. Sir Cloudesley Shovel and the Earl of Dun-donald are interred in the Abbey; Earl Howe in the family vault at Langar, Northamptonshire; the Earl of St. Vincent at Stone, in his native Staffordshire.

Alfred Stevens's memorial to the Iron Duke, which was placed in its present position in 1892, and has been described as "probably the finest plastic work of modern times," consists of a sarcophagus supporting a recumbent bronze figure of Wellington, over which is placed an arched canopy of late Renaissance style on delicately enriched shafts. At each end of the upper part of the canopy is a large bronze group, one representing "Truth tearing out the tongue of Falsehood," and the other "Valour trampling Cowardice under foot." An equestrian statue of the duke, which was designed to surmount the canopy, was never erected. The sarcophagus in which the great soldier is buried in the crypt stands on a massive granite pedestal, and is sculptured from a great block of red porphyry hewn in Cornwall. The sarcophagus in which Nelson is said to be laid was originally the property of Cardinal Wolsey, and was intended by him either for his own burial or for that of King Henry VIII. It is made of black marble and is ascribed by Dean Milman ("Annals of St. Paul's Cathedral") to "the famous Torregiano," and by Sir Walter Besant ("Survey of London") to "a Florentine named Bernardo da Rovezzano."

According to Sir Walter, Nelson's remains are not deposited in this monument. They were placed in a wooden coffin made of the mast of "L'Orient," blown up at the battle of the Nile, which had been presented to Nelson by his friend Hallowell of the "Swiftsure." But this coffin was found to be too large to go into the marble sarcophagus, which is still empty, and therefore a mere cenotaph. It stands on a fine base of black and white marble, and the coffin enclosing Nelson's body in contained in the masonry below. The sarcophagus, it may be added, came from Windsor Castle, and was presented to the Nelson family by King George III. The monument erected to Nelson's memory in the cathedral is the work of Flaxman.

With this bare record of the interment of great and famous men - and these but selected names from our necrology - we must perforce be content.