Westminster Abbey

Westminster Abbey, formally titled the Collegiate Church of Saint Peter at Westminster, is an Anglican church in the City of Westminster, London, England. Since 1066, it has been the location of the coronations of 40 English and British monarchs and a burial site for 18 English, Scottish, and British monarchs.

Quotes

• Mortality, behold and fear!
  What a change of flesh is here!
  Think how many royal bones
  Sleep within this heap of stones.
  • Francis Beaumont, "On the Tombs in Westminster", Poems (1660); a longer version is printed in A Helpe to Discourse, 14th ed. (1654)

• On a very gloomy dismal day, just such a one as it ought to be, I went to see Westminster Abbey.
  • Karl Philipp Moritz, Travels in England in 1782, translated from the German by "a lady" (1795)

• As I passed along the side walls of Westminster Abbey, I hardly saw any thing but marble monuments of great admirals, but which were all too much loaded with finery and ornaments, to make on me at least, the intended impression.
  • Ibid.

• Westminster Abbey is nature crystallized into a conventional form by man, with his sorrows, his joys, his failures, and his seeking for the Great Spirit. It is a frozen requiem, with a nation's prayer ever in dumb music ascending.
  • M. E. W. Sherwood, An Epistle to Posterity (1897), p. 137; see also "Voices of Westminster Abbey", Appleton's Journal (July–December 1878), p. 153