Mrs. Frewen Lord

“ If you have read or heard anything of the story of the Indian Mutiny, when the native soldiers of India rebelled against the English who governed them, and killed hundreds of men, women, and children, you must, I think, have heard the names of Lord Lawrence and Sir James Outram. ”

“ Gradually it became clear that this William Shakespeare, who had come to London quite a poor and unknown man, was a great poet, his plays began to be talked of, and many great and rich men became his friends. In a few years he was no longer poor, and had begun to save money to buy himself a house at Stratford-on-Avon, where he had been born. ”

“ And to his friends, and all who had blind friends or relations, he was never tired of saying, “Do not treat us as though you pitied us for our misfortune; the kindest thing that can be done or said to a blind person is to help him as far as possible to be of good cheer, to give him confidence that help will be afforded him whenever necessary, that there is still good work for him to do, and, the more active his career, the more useful his life to others, the more happy his days to himself.” ”

“ A monastery, as you very likely already know, was a kind of college for monks. Here they lived under the rule of an abbot; and the church belonging to the monastery—for every monastery had a church, as well as a school and hospital or infirmary, belonging to it—was called an Abbey.
In early days the life of the monks was a very busy one. They did all the rough work, such as cooking, and cleaning pots and pans; for although many of them had been great soldiers or great nobles, they did not think any work done for the monastery was beneath them. They ploughed the land and planted seeds ”

“ That is where service is held every morning and every afternoon, and where all the Westminster School boys sit on Sundays when they come to church, for as Westminster school has no chapel of its own, the boys have all their services in the Abbey. Through the choir gates you can see the communion table in front of you, and behind that, again, are all the chapels where the kings and queens are buried. The nave and transepts are full of the monuments and graves of great men. ”

“ Wherever the English flag was flying there should be no slavery, and a slave who could once set foot on any land held by Englishmen became a free man.
When Pitt died Wilberforce was one of those who carried a banner in the great funeral procession, when he was buried, as I have told you, in the same grave with his father, the first Pitt. Many years afterwards Wilberforce too “was buried there amongst his friends,” and in another part of the Abbey there is a large statue of him, as an old and bent man, sitting in an armchair. ”

“ The body of the queen was carried into Henry VII.’s chapel, and all night the Abbey was dimly lighted by the hundred wax torches which were held and kept alight by the soldiers of the Queen’s Guard. The next day she was buried, and the Catholic Bishop of Winchester preached before Elizabeth, who, although she hated the religion, did not refuse to come to the funeral of her sister, as Queen Mary had done years before on the death of their brother Edward, when, rather than come to a Protestant service in the Abbey, she ordered a separate funeral mass to be said before her in the Tower. ”

“ I remember his telling me,” so wrote a friend of his, “if you tread on daisies they turn up underfoot and get rosy. His hearing, on the other hand, was exceptionally keen, and he held it as a sort of compensation for his blurred sight; he could hear the shriek of a bat, which he always said was the test of a quick ear.”
Lord Tennyson was eighty-three when he died, and when he was buried in Westminster Abbey the great church was crowded, not only during the funeral service, but for many days and even weeks afterwards, by hundreds of people, who came to see, and lay flowers on, his grave. ”

“ They are brave words; but Henry Fawcett was, as you have seen, a brave man, and fought and conquered all the great difficulties with which his blindness surrounded him, with as much courage as Sir James Outram showed when he fought his way into Lucknow, or David Livingstone when he journeyed through the deserts and forests of Africa. And that is why a memorial of him was put up in Westminster Abbey by the [Pg 53] people of England, who subscribed for it, so that the heroic life of the Blind Postmaster-General should never be forgotten. ”

“ When the mutiny broke out, it was soon seen that the native soldiers would attack the English in Lucknow, and the people at once set to work to make as many preparations against them as they could. To begin with, Sir Henry Lawrence, who was in command of the soldiers both English and Indian, and who was the brother of Lord Lawrence, of whom we spoke just now, ordered all the women and children to come and live in the Residency, which was supposed to be the safest place in Lucknow. ”

“ It would take too long, and it would not be interesting, to tell you the names of even the chief poems which Lord Tennyson wrote. By-and-by you will read many of them for yourselves, and two I am sure you will specially enjoy. One is the “Siege of Lucknow,” which we have so often spoken of; and the other is the “Revenge,” which is also a story of fighting—but a sea-fight in the time of Queen Elizabeth. Lord Tennyson, like most poets, was more fond of the country than of towns, and most of his life he lived either in the Isle of Wight or in Surrey. ”

“ Just as we have maps to understand the geography of countries, so we have maps, which are called plans, to understand the geography of churches and houses, and the drawing you see on the opposite page is a map or plan of the inside of Westminster Abbey. ”

“ Close to Lord Shaftesbury, there is a monument to a great soldier, General Gordon, [5] who was killed in Egypt in 1885—the same year that Lord Shaftesbury died. He fought in the Crimean War and in China, and was often called “Chinese Gordon.” All the soldiers who served under him were so fond and proud of him that they would have done anything for him. He was very brave, and it was well known that he would always be in the front rank to lead his men when there was a battle, and this, more than anything else, made him popular. ”

“ When he heard that it was the little seven-year-old Handel, he sent for his father, and told [Pg 64] him that his son would one day be such a great musician that it would be quite wrong to make him a lawyer. So from that day George was regularly taught music. When he was older he came to England, and here he lived most of his life, and here he wrote most of the music which is known almost all over the world. He used to give concerts at the English court, to which the Prince of Wales, the son of George II., and the princess, and many great people came. ”

“ Although so many poets were buried in the Abbey, yet there were many others who when they died were buried in the country, or in other churches in London, and, when this was the case, monuments were often put up in the Abbey in memory of them. For instance, Shakespeare, [20] the greatest of all our great poets, was buried at Stratford-on-Avon, where he had lived for the last part of his life, and where he died. ”

“ There is no figure on it, and no carving, as there is on the tombs of the other kings and queens. Dean Stanley explained, when he showed us the Abbey as children, that, for many years after Edward I. died, there was a kind of belief that, although the king was dead, yet, if another war broke out with Scotland, he would once again lead his army against the enemy, as he had so often done before. And so from time to time they would come and lift off the great marble slab which covered his tomb, and which was easily moved, and look in to see if the king was still there. ”

“ At last, at nine o’clock on the evening of the 30th of May, 1857, when the officers were quietly at dinner, nearly all the native soldiers in Lucknow suddenly rose against the English. They loaded their guns, and fired at every one they could see; they broke into the houses, and, after stealing everything they could, set fire to them; and all night there was nothing to be heard save the savage yells of the rebels and the firing of the [Pg 35] guns, and nothing to be seen but fighting men and burning houses. ”

“ In spite of being so learned and so famous, he was always modest about what he knew, and believed that what he had learned and discovered was only a very, very little bit of all there was to learn and discover in the world and about the world. ”

“ Many boys—not only those who intended to become monks when they grew up, but those also who were to go out into the world, or [Pg 18] become soldiers—went to the monastery schools to be taught. Here the sons of great nobles sat to learn their lessons side by side with the children of the poorest people, who were allowed to come and have as good an education as the rich without paying any school fees. The schools were open to all who wished to learn. ”

“ Among all the poets who are buried in the south transept, there is one great musician, George Frederick Handel. [22] Dean Stanley says that “Handel, who composed the music of the ‘Messiah’ and the ‘Israel in Egypt,’ must have been a poet no less than a musician, and therefore he was not unfitly buried in Poets’ Corner.”
Handel was the son of a German doctor, and was born in a little German town. As a boy he was very fond of music, but as his father [Pg 63] meant him to be a lawyer, he would not let him hear any for fear that he would want to be a musician. ”

“ But as time went on the English grew fewer and fewer; every day more soldiers were killed, and every day many died of their wounds, while those who were left alive had to fight day and night. The English ladies nursed the sick men, and cooked the food, which they used to bring out to those who were fighting; and they looked after the children, very many of whom died too. For it was the hottest time of the year in India—a time when English children are sent away to the hills to get fresh air—and, besides suffering from the heat, they missed all the comforts they were accustomed to ”

“ He made up his mind that the Abbey of Westminster was to be the most beautiful church in the world, and he used to invite the best foreign artists and sculptors to come and help to make plans and paintings and carvings for it. He it was who built the shrine where Edward the Confessor is now buried, in the part of the choir behind where the communion table (formerly the high altar) now stands. ”

“ As it approached London it was met by all the clergy. The services were held first at St. Paul’s, and then at the Abbey. No English king’s funeral had ever been so grand. His three chargers were led up to the altar, behind the effigy (a wax model of the king carried outside his coffin) , which lay on a splendid car, accompanied by torches and white-robed priests innumerable, ... and at the extreme eastern end of the Confessor’s Chapel was deposited the body of the most splendid king that England had to that time produced. ”

“ Almost the last thing he said to the other officers was to beg them never to give in to the natives, but to fight as long as there was an English man left alive. Lord Lawrence, his brother, who died some years afterwards, was buried, as you remember, in Westminster Abbey; but Sir Henry Lawrence was carried out of the Residency while the fighting was going on, and the bullets were falling like rain, and buried side by side with some private soldiers who had also been killed by the rebels. ”

“ But I must not stay to tell you more of him now, for there are many other people I want you to hear about. “This Abbey,” Dean Stanley used to say, “is full of the remembrances of great men and famous women. But it is also full of the remembrances of little boys and girls whose death shot a pang through the hearts of those who loved them, and who wished that they should never be forgotten.”
So now, not far from the monuments to these two great men, we come upon the tombs of two [Pg 30] boys who are buried here: one Edward Mansell, [8] a boy of fourteen, who died as long ago as 1681 ”

“ When Lord Shaftesbury saw these things—for he went into the mills and the factories, and he went down into the mines—he made [Pg 26] up his mind that something must be done for such children. So he made speeches in Parliament, in which he told of the cruelty with which thousands of English children were treated; and at last laws were made by which it was forbidden to let such little children work in mines and factories at all, and by which older children were given shorter hours to work and more time for rest and fresh air. ”

“ Then, again, there were the children who worked in coal-mines, who spent all their days in damp, dark mines, who never saw the sun, and who had to draw the trucks filled with coal, or carry great baskets full of it on their backs. ”

“ When he grew up he became a missionary, and went to Africa, where he made many discoveries, travelling into parts of the country where no one had ever been before, and teaching the natives, who were quite ignorant and wild, but who grew very fond of this “white man who treated black men as his brothers”—for so one native chief described him—and who cared for them, and doctored them when they were ill, and gave up all his life to them. ”

“ This poem and very many others were written by Alfred Tennyson, the great poet, who was made by the Queen Poet Laureate of England, and then, many years afterwards, Lord Tennyson, by which name you will always hear him spoken of.
There is a story told of how the first verses Alfred Tennyson ever made were written. His father was a clergyman, and Alfred and his brothers and sisters lived all their lives in the country, running wild in the woods and the fields, and learning all about birds and flowers, until they were old enough to go to school. ”