apt
nowadays to dwell on all too hardly, she was perhaps the greatest woman
that England has ever seen. Her tomb, built by James the First, "of
white marble and touchstone from the royal store at Whitehall," is not
only a worthy memorial of her, but a token of the peace and goodwill
that the great Abbey speaks of to all who will hear. For by her own
desire, Elizabeth was buried in the same grave with her sister Mary,
that sister whose very name seems only to bring to mind hatred and
persecution, the stake and the fagot. Now she and Elizabeth are at
peace. And on their monument James the First inscribed "two lines full
of a far deeper feeling than we should naturally have ascribed to
him":[48]

_Fellows in the kingdom, and in the tomb. Here we sleep; Mary and
Elizabeth, the Sisters; in hope of the resurrection._

There is another effigy of Queen Elizabeth in the Abbey; and a very
curious one it is. From the thirteenth century until the beginning of
the eighteenth, it was the custom at royal funerals to carry a
life-size, waxen image before the coffin, representing the dead in the
clothes they wore. These effigies were left on the grave for about a
month, and some of the Abbey officials gained their living by showing
them to visitors. Most of the waxen figures have crumbled to dust. The
writer believes that she was the last person to look at that of hapless
Anne Boleyn. It had so fallen to pieces as to be a very hideous object,
and it has since been locked up and shown to no one. But in an upper
chamber over the Islip chapel, reached by a little dark stairway, eleven
of these strange figures are still to be seen in wainscot cupboards with
glass doors. Among them is Queen Elizabeth; not the original
effigy--that was worn out in 1708, when a certain Tom Brown who wrote _A
Walk through London and Westminster_, says that he saw the remains of
it. This is a copy made in 1760; and we see the poor old queen, dressed
in the long-waisted bodice and hooped skirt we know so well in pictures.
It is a piteous sight, however; for the effigy, battered and sorely the
worse for wear, is leaning up against the side of the glass cupboard in
a most undignified attitude. One would rather think of her as she lies
still and stately in the beautiful north aisle.

But we must linger no longer about Elizabeth's effigy or her tomb. We
must pass on to the east end of the chapel, and there we shall find the
monuments of her two little cousins.