Hitherto our attention has been confined to the City within the walls. It is time to step outside the walls.

All this time, i.e. ever since peaceful occupation became possible, a town had been growing up on the west side of London. You have seen that formerly there spread a broad marsh over this part. Some rising ground kept what is now the Strand above the river, but Westminster, except for certain reed-grown islets, was nothing but a marsh covered over twice in the day by the tide. The river thus spreading out over marshes on either bank was quite shallow, and could in certain places be forded. The spot where any ford existed afterwards became a ferry. Lambeth Bridge spans the river at one such place, the memory of which is now maintained in the name of the Horseferry Road. The largest of these islets was once called Thorney, i.e. the Isle of Thorns. If you will take a map of Westminster, shift the bank of the river so as to make it flow along Abingdon Street, draw a stream running down College Street into the Thames; another running into the Thames across King Street, and draw a ditch or moat connecting the two streams along Delahaye Street and Princes Street you will have Thorney, about a quarter of a mile long, and not quite so much broad, standing just above high water level. This was the original Precinct of Westminster.

The Abbey of St. Peter's, Westminster, is said to have been founded on the first conversion of the East Saxons, and at the same time as the Foundation of St. Paul's. We know nothing about the foundation of the church. During the Danish troubles the Abbey was deserted. It was refounded by Dunstan. It was, however, rebuilt in much greater splendour by Edward the Confessor. Of his work something still remains, and can be pointed out to the visitor. But the present Abbey contains work by Henry III., Edward I., Richard II.—Whittington being commissioner for the work—Henry VII. and Wren, Hawksmoor and Gilbert Scott the architects.

There is no monument on British soil more venerable than Westminster Abbey. You must not think that you know the place when you have visited it once or twice. You must go there again and again. Every visit should teach you something of your country and its history. The building itself betraying to those who can read architecture the various periods at which its builders lived: the beauty of the building, the solemnity of the services—these are things which one must visit the Abbey often in order to understand. Then there are the associations of the Abbey; the things that have been done in the Abbey: the crowning of the Kings, in a long line from Edward the Confessor downwards. Here Edward the Fourth's Queen, Elizabeth Woodville, took sanctuary when her husband suffered reverse: here the unfortunate Edward V. was born. Here the same unhappy Queen brought her two boys when her husband died. Here Caxton set up his first printing press: here is the coronation chair. Here is the shrine of the sainted Edward the Confessor. It is robbed of its precious stones and its gold: but the shrine is the same as that before which for five hundred years people knelt as to the protector saint of England. This is the burial-place of no fewer than twenty-six of our Kings and their Queens. This is the sacred spot where we have buried most of our great men. To name a few whose monuments you should look for, here are Sir William Temple, Lord Chatham, Fox and Wilberforce, among statesmen; of soldiers there are Prince Rupert and Monk; of Indian fame, here are Lord Lawrence and Lord Clyde; of sailors, Blake, Cloudesley Shovel, and Lord Dundonald. Of poets, Chaucer, Spenser, Beaumont, Ben Jonson, Dryden, Prior, Addison, Gay, Campbell. Of historians and prose writers, Samuel Johnson, Macaulay, Dickens, Livingston, Isaac Newton. Many others there are to look for, notably the great poet Tennyson, buried here in October 1892.

Read what was written by Jeremy Taylor, a great divine, on Westminster Abbey:—

'A man may read a sermon, the best and most passionate that ever man preached, if he shall but enter into the sepulchre of Kings.... 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 or our crowns shall be less.'