represent the taste, and consequently in part the history, of a period. England would not be what she is if the eighteenth century, or the first twenty years of the nineteenth, were wiped out of recollection, and to remove the monuments of those twenty years is so far to wipe them out of recollection. Further, we cannot restore the Abbey to the state it was in when those monuments were put up. The walls, alike of nave, choir, and transepts, had originally very beautiful arcading, which has been barbarously cut away to make room for monuments. Remove the monuments, and there will be either a scar or a piece of imitation sculpture. Either way, the historical character of the building is injured. Instead of representing the taste of successive generations, it would represent the taste of a single generation, and that a generation which differs from all the rest in not knowing its own mind, or being certain what it likes. The suggestion of memorial brasses is free from these drawbacks, but it shares to the full another. A monument to a person buried in a church ought to be close to the place of burial. It would be eminently unsatisfactory to the visitor who comes to see the tomb of a great man, to be told that the man himself lies in quite another part of the church; whereas the monument he is looking at covers the dust of quite a different person. To make monuments really valuable, they must do what they profess to do, - keep alive the memory of those who are buried underneath them.

than 1800, this period might have been nearly doubled. It is hard to explain the reckless waste of space which went on side by side with a growing tendency to regard the Abbey as the appropriate rest ing-place of illustrious Englishmen. In one and the same year, for example, the burials in the Abbey included Pitt and Fox, a prebendary, and the infant son of the chapter clerk. In the cloisters, which but for this would have supplied a valuable addition to the space in the Abbey itself, things were still worse. In the first twenty years of the present century, there were a hundred and seven person buried there, and of these not more than half-adozen were so much as connected with the capitular body. The result of this indiscriminate burial is, that the cloisters are full. The one green space surrounded by the cloisters, which Mr. Knowles has suggested as available for future burials, has not been used for that purpose for six hundred years. But at that date it seems to have been full of bodies, and any excavation disturbs the bones that still remain. This, to our minds, disposes of Mr. Knowles's proposal. It is a fatal objection to a place of burial that every foot of the ground has already been used for the same purpose. Whatever title the remains of the dead have to reverent treatment, is not invalidated by mere lapse of time. Still, there is no need to take thought for the twenty-first century, and if we can bury the great dead in the Abbey for a hundred years more, we may be content. At least, we might be content if burial were all that we had to think of. But as Except, therefore, in those rare cases in a public honor, Westminster Abbey means which the honor of burial in Westminster more than burial. It means a monument, Abbey is enough without any record of and for monuments, the Dean of Westmin- the fact in the immediate neighborhood, ster tells us, "there is almost no space." some kind of additional building is really The Abbey is already full of them, greatly, needed. And here the evidence of the in many cases, to its disfigurement. There Archbishop of Canterbury is exceedingly are two ways, indeed, in which this objec- valuable. He begins with the very true tion might be got over. The worst of the observation that we should first underexisting monuments might be removed, stand clearly what it is we want. Is the and the space they occupy filled with new Westminster Abbey to be a civil or something better, or future monuments an ecclesiastical building,- -a church or might be limited to a single kind-in a pantheon? If the former, it cannot be itself one of the most beautiful-memo- too closely united with the existing buildrial brasses. But the first of these plans is open to objections proper to itself as to one which is common to the two. We agree with Mr. Somers Clarke, that the fact that a monument is there is a sufficient reason for not disturbing it. Be it bad or good, it has a historical value. It speaks from the time when it was put up, and little as we may care for full-bottomed wigs or feeble classicalities in stone, they

ing; if the latter, it ought to be distinctly separate from it. Though the two buildings would have a common use, they would express quite different ideas. In France or Italy, it might be a question which of these two ideas should be chosen. But in England it is not so. Those who wish to lie in Westminster Abbey, wish it in part because it is a church. They would not be equally anxious to be buried

poned, as the decoration of St. Paul's has been postponed, to a future which seems never to come any nearer. If the architect is left unfettered, we shall at least get the best he can give us, and if he is chosen wisely, that means the best that lies within our reach.

From The Speaker.

THE CAROL.

AN ECLOGUE.

in Westminster Hall. What is wanted, therefore, is a building which shall be as much a church as the Abbey, and yet be something neither distinct from nor inferior to the Abbey. Consequently, the addition must be part of the same consecrated building. The new chapel should not be simply a receptacle for monuments for which there is no room in the Abbey, but a genuine extension of the Abbey, partaking of the same sacred character, and available from time to time for the same sacred purpose. In fact, it should stand in the same relation to the Abbey as that in which Henry VII.'s I WAS sixteen that Christmas; all VerChapel stands. The archbishop then crit- yan parish knows the date of the famous icises from this point of view two of the "black winter," when the Johann brig suggested sites for the new building. The came ashore on Kibberick beach, with a "wreath of chapels " round the Chapter- dozen foreigners frozen stiff on her foreHouse he rejects on the ground that the top, and Lawyer Job, up at Ruan, lost all Chapter-House is the civil or secular part his lambs but two. There was neither of the Abbey, and that to make chapels rhyme nor wit in the season; and up to open into a place of business would be to St. Thomas's eve, when it first started to sacrifice the idea of a church. The refec- freeze, the folk were thinking that summer tory, which lies to the south of the cloisters, meant to run straight into spring. I mind he thinks a bad site for the same reason. the ash being in leaf on Advent Sunday, The idea of a church, indeed, is not sacri- and a crowd of martins skimming round ficed, as in the former case, but the identity the church windows during sermon time. of the church is. The cloisters would be Each morning brought blue sky, warm interposed between the Abbey and the mists, and a dew that hung on the bramnew chapel; and, unless the character of bles till near noon. The frogs were the cloisters were altered, any two build-spawning in the pools; primroses were ings so placed would be distinct and sep-out by scores and monthly roses blooming arate from one another. This argument, if it is accepted as conclusive, leaves two sites between which the choice would lie, the north side of the nave, and the east side of the Chapter-House. To the former, the archbishop objects, we think with justice, that it would block out the one clear view of the Abbey that can be obtained from the street. The latter might be utilized in more ways than one; but into this question we shall not enter.

still; and master shot a goat-sucker on the last day in November. All this puzzled the sheep, I suppose, and gave them a notion that their time, too, was at hand. At any rate the lambs fell early; and when they fell, it had turned to perishing cold.

That Christmas eve, while the singers were up at the house and the fiddles going like mad, it was a dismal time for two of us. Laban Pascoe, the hind, spent his One wish, however, we may be permitted night in the upper field where the sheep to express. It is that the commission or lay, while I spent mine in the chall lookcommittee, or whatever the authority may ing after Molly, our Guernsey, that had be which has charge of the matter, shall slipped her calf in the afternoon being content themselves with choosing the site promised the casling's skin for a Sunday and the architect, and not attempt to waistcoat, if I took care of the mother. choose the design. If they pick out the Bating the cold air that came under the man who, from his previous work and door, I kept pretty cosy, what with the present reputation, they think best quali-hay-bands round my legs and the warm fied to build a worthy addition to the great Abbey, they will have done the utmost that a committee of amateurs can hope to accomplish. If they essay anything more, one of two results will almost certainly follow. Either the design will be modified to meet this and that criticism, so that in the end all its distinctive character will be lost, or the choice will have to be post

breath of the cows; for we kept five. There was no wind outside, but moonlight and a still, frozen sky, like a soundingboard; so that every note of the music reached me, with the bleat of Laban's sheep far up the hill and the waves' wash on the beaches below. Inside the chall the only sounds were the slow chewing of

*Cow-house.

resting one hand on the edge of the manger.

"And now there's nothing to do but sit down and wait for the wise men and the shepherds."

It was a little while that she watched, being long over-tired. The warm air of the chall weighed on her eyelids; and, as they closed, her head sank on my shoulder. For ten minutes I sat, listening to her breathing. Molly rose heavily from her bed and lay down again, with a long sigh; another cow woke up and rattled her rope a dozen times through its ring; up at the house the fiddling grew more furious; but the little maid slept on. At last I wrapped the sack closely round her, and lifting her in my arms, carried her out into the night. She was my master's daughter, and I had not the courage to kiss so much as her hair. Yet I had no envy for the dancers,

then.

As we passed into the cold air she stirred.

"Dick, did they come? And where are you carrying me? Then, when I told her, "Dick, I will never speak to you again, if you don't carry me first to the gate of the upper field."

So I carried her to the gate, and sitting up in my arms she called twice, "Laban Laban!" "What cheer-O?" the hind called back. His lantern was a spark on the hillside, and he could not tell the voice at

66 me

MR. NORMAN LOCKYER'S newly propounded and brilliantly reasoned heavenly bodies has at length been chalteoritic" theory of the constitution of the lenged by Dr. Huggins. Mr. Lockyer, it will be remembered, argues that the nebulæ, the comets, and nearly all the stars are really aggregations of meteorites, whose collisions make them luminous. Dr. Huggins enjoys a world-wide reputation as the co-founder, with the late Father Secchi, of the science of stellar spectroscopy; and he is also the author of the more orthodox view of the simply gaseous constitution of the nebulæ, which Mr. Lockyer's researches tend to contravene. In a brief letter published in June, on "The Spectrum of the Nebulæ," Dr. Huggins announces a very important cor

roboration of his own view. The astron

omers at the now famous Lick observatory at Mount Hamilton, in California, report that they have discovered in the nebula Σ 5 that which Dr. Huggins himself had asserted of the great nebula in Orion namely, that the chief line seen in the spectroscope is not due to the substance which Mr. Lockyer so commonly finds in the spectra of meteorites - viz., magnesium, or its oxide. Dr. Huggins is content at present with this negation of Mr. Lockunder-yer's position. He does not undertake to say what constituent of the nebula the line in question really represents; he simply have to take of the nebulæ and of their adds the pregnant words: "The views we relationship to the other heavenly bodies depend very greatly upon the coincidence or otherwise of the chief nebula line with

"I'm afraid we can't make him stand," she whispered. "Hush; don't shout!" For a moment, she seemed to consider; and then her shrill treble quavered out on the frosty air, my own deeper voice taking up the second line,

The first "Nowell" the angel did say
Was to certain poor shepherds, in fields as
they lay,-

In fields as they lay, a-tending their sheep,
On a cold winter's night that was so deep-
Nowell! Nowell!

Christ is born in Israel!

Our voices followed our shadows across the gate and far up the field, where Laban's sheep lay dotted. What Laban thought of it I cannot tell; but to me it seemed, for the moment, that the shepherd among his ewes, the dancers within the house, the sea beneath us, and the stars in

the magnesium band." The alleged coincidence, it must be remembered, is the largest postulate of Mr. Lockyer's meteor. itic theory.

In order to appreciate a question so grand in its scope, probing, as it does, some of the most hidden secrets of the great cosmical laboratories of the distant heavens, we shall do well to recall a few facts antecedent to the immediate inquiry. We have to bear in mind not only the astounding discoveries of the spectroscope in stellar chemistry, through which we learn the kind of fuel which is glowing

The temperature of the vapors produced by collisions in nebula is about that of the Bunsen burner. The temperature of vapors produced by collisions in the hot stars is about that of the Bessemer flame.

in the most distant of the stars, but also | heat brought about by condensation of the progress which had been made in the meteor swarms. The spectra of all bodies earlier investigation of the nebule when depends upon the heat of the meteorites that inquiry passed from the hands of Sir produced by collisions, and the average William Herschel into those of Dr. Hug- space between the meteorites in the gins. Herschel, the greatest of modern swarm, or in the case of consolidated astronomers, and, indeed, the founder of swarms, upon the time which has elapsed sidereal astronomy, was the first to make since complete vaporization. the nebulæ a serious study.* The view now so commonly accepted, that these mysterious-looking objects are huge gasclouds, which eventually condense into stars and solid worlds, was arrived at by Herschel himself. From the most diffused nebulosity, barely visible in the Meteorites are formed by the condensamost powerful, light-gathering telescopes, tion of vapors thrown off by collisions. to the planetary nebulæ, which he sup- The small particles increase by fusion posed to be centrally solid, instances were brought about again by collisions, and this alleged by him of every stage and phase increase may go on until the meteorites of such condensation. But the telescope may be large enough to be smashed by was then, as now, unable to distinguish collision, when the heat of impact is not between the dim rays of the remoter clus-sufficient to produce volatilization of the ters and the milky light of true gaseous whole mass. nebulæ. It was with an altogether different instrument that Dr. Huggins, in 1864, put an end to the fluctuations of opinion These are some of the conclusions to which even the great Parsonstown six-foot which Mr. Lockyer's researches have led reflecting telescope had failed to termi- him. It will perhaps make his point of nate. His examination of a bright plan- view more intelligible if we mention in its etary nebula in the constellation Draco favor (1) Schiaparelli's discovery that showed that this body was a mass of glow-comets at least are connected with swarms ing vapor. In the next four years the of meteorites; (2) Dr. Huggins's observastudy of some seventy other nebulation of the chief nebular ray as a bright showed that fundamentally the composi-point on the continuous spectrum of tion of all bodies of this class may be comet 1866 1, which remains valid eviassumed to be the same; all are probably dence of the physical links between nebin more or less advanced stages of condensation from mere gases into stars.

This view of the gaseous character of the nebula would have to be considerably modified had Mr. Lockyer's chief premiss been substantiated. Mr. Lockyer seeks to prove that even the most rudimentary of the nebulæ are not solely gaseous, but owe their luminosity to the collisions of solid meteoritic bodies of which they are composed. He even extends this generalization to all the heavenly bodies except the hottest stars, in which the meteorites become completely vaporized by the high temperature. The following are some of the leading propositions he lays down.

The existing distinction between stars, comets, and nebulæ rests on no physical basis.

All self-luminous bodies in the celestial spaces are composed of meteorites, or of masses of meteoritic vapor produced by

For an admirable résumé of Herschel's work in this and other departments of observational astronomy, see Miss A. M. Clerke's "History of Astronomy in the Nineteenth century."

New stars, whether seen in nebulæ or not, are produced by the clash of meteor swarms.

ulæ and comets insisted upon by Mr. Lockyer. It may also be said that in some respects the meteoritic theory would supply the clue to certain phenomena, such as the sudden brightening up in the Andromeda nebula a few years since, and the apparition of new stars, which seem to point to the passage and clashing together of meteor swarms. So far as meteors or shooting stars themselves are concerned, he is able to quote Professor Herschel and Konkoly to the effect that in the generality of meteor falls the lines of magne. sium are the first to show themselves, and that the beautiful green light which is so often associated with these falling bodies is due to the incandescence of the vapor of magnesium.

Nevertheless, Mr. Lockyer's theory would appear to have been an a priori theory, followed by a diligent search for He sees meteorites facts to illustrate it. everywhere. "The heavens are full of stones, and hardly anything else." And what can these be, he seems to say, but the rudimentary stuff which goes to the