It is here, literally to every
dimple in the back of the falling hand, and every crinkle of the
vermiculated stone-work. What a curious pleasure it is to puzzle out the
inscriptions on the monuments in the background!--for the beauty of your
photograph is, that you may work out minute derails with the microscope,
just as you can with the telescope in a distant landscape in Nature.
There is a lady, for instance, leaning upon an urn,--suggestive, a
little, of Morgiana and the forty thieves. Above is a medallion of one
wearing a full periwig. Now for a half-inch lens to make out the specks
that seem to be letters. "Erected to the Memory of William Pulteney,
Earl of Bath, by his Brother"--That will do,--the inscription operates
as a cold bath to enthusiasm. But here is our own personal namesake,
the once famous Rear Admiral of the White, whose biography we can find
nowhere except in the "Gentleman's Magazine," where he divides the glory
of the capture of Quebec with General Wolfe. A handsome young man with
hyacinthine locks, his arms bare and one hand resting on a cannon. We
remember thinking our namesake's statue one of the most graceful in the
Abbey, and have always fallen back on the memory of that and of Dryden's
Achates of the "Annus Mirabilis," as trophies of the family.
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