When James I. came to the throne, Lancelot Andrewes was Dean of Westminster, and he devoted himself to the care of the school, which, under Elizabeth's endowments, was now prospering greatly. He had this excellent reputation, "that all the places where he had preferment were better for it," and it is certain that either he must have been a remarkable master or the Westminster boys must have been models of their kind, for this is how Hacket, once his pupil, rapturously describes him:—

"Who could come near the shrine of such a saint and not offer up a few p?ans of glory on it? Or how durst I omit it? For he it was that first planted me in my tender studies and watered them continually with his bounty.... He did often supply the place of head-master and usher for the space of an whole week together, and gave us not an hour of loitering time from morning till night. He never walked to Chiswick for his recreation without a brace of this young fry, and in that wayfaring leisure had a singular dexterity to fill those narrow vessels with a funnel. And what was the greatest burden of his toil, sometimes twice in the week, sometimes oftener, he sent for the uppermost scholars to his lodgings at night and kept them with him from eight to eleven, unfolding to them the best rudiments of the Greek tongue and the elements of Hebrew grammar. And all this he did to boys without any compulsion or correction; nay, I never heard him to utter so much as a word of austerity."

Altogether Andrewes was a man of great influence and renown both as a scholar and a preacher, so he was promoted to a bishopric after a short time, and was succeeded by Richard Neile, who had himself been a boy of Westminster School, and who, therefore, in his turn carefully fostered its growth. He too became a bishop in three years, and of the two deans who followed him, Montague and Tounson, we know little except that the one was "a person of wit and entertaining conversation," and the other "one of a graceful presence and an excellent preacher, who left a widow and fifteen children unprovided for."

It is Hacket who again gives us an amusing picture of the excitement among all the divines when it became known that Tounson was to be Bishop of Salisbury and that the Deanery of Westminster was vacant.

"It was a fortunate seat," he says, "near the Court. Like the office over the king of Persia's garden at Babylon, stored with the most delicious fruits. He that was trusted with the garden was the Lord of the Palace."

Among those who earnestly desired the post was John Williams, one of the chaplains to James I., and in these words he applied for it through Lord Burleigh:—

"MY MOST NOBLE LORD,—I am an humble suitor, first to be acknowledged your servant, and then that I may with your happy hand be transplanted to Westminster if the Deanery shall still prove vacant. I trouble not your Honour for profit, but for convenience, for being unmarried and inclining so to continue, I do find that Westminster is fitter by much for that disposition. If your Honour be not bent upon an ancient servitor, I beseech you to think on me."

Fortunately for Westminster he obtained his heart's desire, and in 1620 began his useful rule. He took for his exemplars Abbot Islip and Dean Andrewes, imitating the first by carefully restoring the many parts of the Abbey which through neglect were falling in ruins, and the second by encouraging the school. Then, "that God might be praised with a cheerful noise in His sanctuary," he obtained, as Hacket tells us, "the sweetest music both for the organ and for voices of all parts that was ever heard in an English quire;" and in Jerusalem Chamber he gave many entertainments with music, which "the most famous masters of this delightful faculty frequented." To enlarge the boundaries of learning he turned one of the deserted rooms in the cloisters, of old used by the monks, into a library, bought out of his own means a large number of books from a certain Mr. Baker of Highgate, and was so public-spirited that he allowed men of learning from all parts of London to have access to those precious works.

He was in great favour with James, who made him Lord Keeper of the Seal and Bishop of Lincoln, allowing him to hold Westminster at the same time, and though his enemies had much to say on the subject of his holding so many offices, it must be said in justice that he got through an amazing amount of work. Under him it seemed as if some of the splendid hospitalities which had ceased since the days when the Abbots kept open house were to be revived, for Dean Williams entertained in Jerusalem Chamber the French ambassadors who came over to arrange for the marriage between Prince Charles and Princess Henriette.

Before the feast he led them into the Abbey, which was "stuck with flambeaux everywhere that they might cast their eyes upon the stateliness of the church," while "the best finger of the age, Dr. Orlando Gibbons," played the organ for their entertainment.

You will see a memorial of this banquet in the carvings over the mantelpiece in the Jerusalem Chamber for on one side is Charles I. and on the other side his French bride.

But with the death of James I., Lord Keeper, Bishop and Dean Williams fell upon evil days, for he was disliked by the Duke of Buckingham and Laud, who entirely influenced the king, and was not even allowed to officiate on the coronation day.
JERUSALEM CHAMBER.
JERUSALEM CHAMBER.

Under the Commonwealth the Abbey fared badly, for with a fanatical horror of anything that reminded them of royalty or of Rome, the Parliamentarians had not the smallest regard for it, and delighted in showing their contempt for its past. How far the soldiers were allowed to desecrate its walls and its altars it is difficult to clearly ascertain, and we may fairly believe that the story of how they pulled down the organ, pawned the pipes for ale, and played boisterous games up and down the church "to show their Christian liberty," is a great exaggeration, even if any such thing took place at all. Certainly the altar in Henry VII.'s chapel, under which lay buried Edward VI., was destroyed, the copes and vestments were sold, and many windows and monuments supposed to teach lessons of superstition and idolatry were demolished. No dean was appointed. The church being put under a Parliamentary Committee, Presbyterian preachers conducted morning exercises, which took the place of the daily services, and Bradshaw, the President of the court which tried and condemned to death Charles I., settled himself into the deserted deanery. A strange sight indeed it must have been to those who noted it to watch this man going backwards and forwards between Abbot Islip's house and the Hall of Westminster Palace, holding in the hollow of his hand the life of the king of England!

Westminster School, which, under Elizabeth, had been set on its new and enlarged footing, and since then had vigorously expanded under the various head-masters, alone continued to flourish. Its scholars naturally were closely connected with the life that centred round Westminster: they listened to the debates of Parliament, they flocked to hear the trials in Westminster Hall, they attended the services in the Abbey. Their feelings ran high during the Civil War. Pym, Cromwell, and Bradshaw they hated; the execution of Charles roused their deepest indignation, and they listened in awed horror as Bushby, their master, read solemnly the prayer for the king at the very moment when the scaffold was being erected at Whitehall. It was the strong personality of Bushby and his tactful management which saved the school from being seriously interfered with at the hands of the all-powerful Parliament, so that for fifty-five years this model for head-masters "ruled with his rod and his iron will, and successfully piloted this bark through very stormy seas." He was full of enthusiasm and energy and he was more anxious that his pupils should become men of action and character than accomplished scholars. His monument, which is near the Poets' Corner shows him, in the words of the inscription, "such as he appeared to human eyes;" and the words which follow tell how he "sowed a plenteous harvest of ingenious men; discovered, managed, and improved the natural genius in every one; formed and nourished the minds of youths, and gave to the school of Westminster the fame of which it boasts."

But the Abbey was a national institution, too firmly builded on the rocks to be more than shaken by the passing storms. It had weathered the earthquake of the Reformation, it had survived the tempests of the Revolution. With the Restoration came the calm, and quietly the old life was resumed. I have but little more to tell you of the inner story of the Abbey, nor from this time forward do kings and queens play any very important part in its story. It is the tombs and monuments which now begin, more closely even than before, to cement the tie between Westminster and the pages of English history. So I will only tell you in a few words how Dean Sprat busied himself with the restoration of the great buildings, the architect being Sir Christopher Wren, who, as you know, designed St. Paul's Cathedral, and rebuilt so many of the old London churches which the Great Fire had destroyed, and how Dean Atterbury carried on the work, including the rebuilding of the great dormitory, until his devotion to the Stuart cause and his opposition to George I. caused him to be sent first to the Tower, and afterwards as an exile to France. Atterbury loved well his Abbey, and his last request was that he might walk through it once more, especially to see the glass which was his own gift to it, and which still exists in the beautiful rose window over the north door. But the sad thing about these so-called restorations is that so much of the matchless old work was destroyed, and nobody seemed in the least concerned at this. That was an age when the glories of medieval architecture appear to have lost all their charm in men's eyes, when the love of beautiful things was at its lowest ebb. The Westminster boys played their games in the chapels, and were allowed to skip from tomb to tomb in the Confessor's shrine; hideous monuments were erected and crowded together, nothing old was reverenced, and we can only be thankful that more was not destroyed or hopelessly ruined. And yet, in spite of this apparent indifference, here and there were men who found themselves stirred when they came within those walls as they were stirred nowhere else, so that many a writer, including Addison, Steele, and Goldsmith, and earlier still, John Milton, has paid homage, even in those unimaginative days, to that fair place, "so far exceeding human excellence that a man would think it was knit together by the fingers of angels."

One more dean I must tell you of, and that is Dean Stanley, who, with his wife, lies in the south aisle of Henry VII.'s Chapel. For it was when he was appointed to Westminster in 1864 that once again the Abbey became something more than a great memory of former days. First of all he unfolded the storied past, clearing up many a mystery, setting right many an error, and then, impelled by a deep reverence for all its great associations, he consistently carried on its history. In every trace of his work we find this same wise spirit of sympathy and understanding. To him the Abbey was our greatest national treasure; his ideal was, not only so to keep it, but to make it a living influence among all English-speaking people. And thanks in no small degree to him, Westminster Abbey is to-day a very magnet in the heart of the empire, to which high and low rich and poor, learned and ignorant are drawn from far and near, to drink in, as they are able, its memories and its beauties, to do homage to those............