dren of Westminster draws to a close. Besides those whose lives and
stories we have studied together, there are several of whom little is
known but the facts of their death and burial in our stately Abbey. The
year before little William, Duke of Gloucester, was born, two "holy
innocents" were laid to rest at Westminster; one, Nicholas Bagnall, an
"infant of two months old, by his nurse unfortunately overlaid," is
commemorated by a white marble urn in the Chapel of St. Nicholas, among
the Percys and the Cecils. And in the Cloisters there is a touchingly
simple tablet which Dean Stanley delighted to point out to every one,
bearing these words:

"Jane Lister, dear child, died October 7, 1688."

[Illustration: A WESTMINSTER BOY.]

In 1711, three years before Queen Anne's death, a young Westminster
Scholar, Carteret by name, aged nineteen, was buried in the North Aisle
of the Choir, "with the chiefs of his house." This is, I think, the only
instance of a Westminster boy being buried in the Abbey. And young
Carteret, the Westminster Scholar, leads me to an institution at
Westminster which I have too long neglected. I mean Westminster School.

From the earliest days of the Abbey, from Edith and Edward the
Confessor's time, a school for the training of the novices was attached
to Westminster as to other great monasteries. When the constitution of
the Abbey was changed by the dissolution of the monasteries in 1539-40,
Henry the Eighth founded a school in connection with the reformed Abbey.
But the school was refounded and enlarged by Queen Elizabeth in the year
of the Armada, and to her we owe its prosperity and fame. The great
tables of chestnut wood in the black-beamed College Dining Hall, are
said by tradition to have been given by the queen from the wrecks of the
Spanish Armada. From this time forth Westminster School took its place
among the most famous public schools in England. The names of many of
the greatest of England's worthies are inscribed on the walls of the old
schoolroom. In Elizabeth's reign the famous Camden was its head master.
And a few years later we find young George Herbert being commended to
the Dean for Westminster School, where "the beauties of his pretty
behavior and wit shined and became so eminent and lovely in this his
tender age, that he seemed marked out for piety and to have the care of
heaven, and of a particular good angel to guard and guide him."[119]

Westminster School was always loyal,