Instead of one vast eastern window, there are rows of windows
lighting the Lady Chapel, and seen through rows of arches in the screen
of the chancel; the effect being, whoever is to have the credit of it,
very rich and beautiful. There is, I think, no stained glass in the
windows of the nave, though in the windows of the chancel there is some
of recent date, and from fragments of veritable antique. The effect of
the whole interior is grand, expansive, and both ponderous and airy; not
dim, mysterious, and involved, as Gothic interiors often are, the
roundness and openness of the arches being opposed to this latter effect.
When the chanting came to a close, one verger took his stand at the
entrance of the choir, and another stood farther up the aisle, and then
the door of a stall opened, and forth came a clerical dignity of much
breadth and substance, aged and infirm, and was ushered out of the choir
with a great deal of ceremony. We took him for the bishop, but he proved
to be only a canon. We now engaged an attendant to show us through the
Lady Chapel and the other penetralia, which it did not take him long to
accomplish. One of the first things he showed us was the tombstone, in
the pavement of the southern aisle, beneath which Mary, Queen of Scots,
had been originally buried, and where she lay for a quarter of a century,
till borne to her present resting-place in Westminster Abbey. It is a
plain marble slab, with no inscription.
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