Reflections in Westminster Abbey, by Joseph Addison

William Thackeray said of Joseph Addison that he deserved as much love and esteem as can be aright claimed by any of our infirm and erring race. Thomas Macaulay described Addisons periodical essays as perhaps the finest . . . in the English language. And Samuel Johnson characterized Addisons prose as the model of the warmness style on grave subjects not formal, on light cause not groveling. Keep Johnsons observation in mind as you infer Reflections in Westminster Abbey, which originally appeared in issue 26 of The Spectator, March 30, 1711. Addison died on June 17, 1719.He was buried in the north aisle of the Henry VII chapel in Westminster Abbey. A century later a statue was erected in his recognise in the poetical quarternow known as Poets Corner. Reflections in Westminster Abbey by Joseph Addison When I am in a serious humor, I very often walk by myself in Westminster Abbey where the gloominess of the turn up and the use to which it is applied, with the solemnity of the building and the condition of the people who lie in it, are apt to fill the mind with a kind of melancholy, or rather thoughtfulness, that is not disagreeable.I yester twenty-four hours passed a whole afternoon in the churchyard, the cloisters, and the church, amusing myself with the tombstones and inscriptions that I met with in those several regions of the dead. Most of them recorded zilch else of the buried person solely that he was innate(p) upon one day and died upon another the whole history of his life be comprehended in those two circumstances that are common to all mankind.I could not barely look upon these registers of existence, whether of brass or marble, as a kind of chaff upon the departed persons who had left no other memorial of them but that they were born and that they died. They put me in mind of several persons mentioned in the battles of heroic poems, who concur sounding names given them for no other reason but that they may be killed, and are celebrated f or nothing but being knocked on the head. The life of these men is finely described in dedicated Writ by the Path of an Arrow, which is immediately closed up and lost.