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Show Westminster, Abbet. The dean and chapter recently resolved to try the experiment of throwing the Abbey open gratis to all comers every Monday in the week. Easter Monday beingnat-urally beingnat-urally the first Monday in this year,the experiment has been entirely successful, success-ful, and the birds of ill omen, the daws and bats which haunt the towers of the old Abbey, and cluster thick around its precincts, have been confused by the result. '1 hey declared that ill would come of it ; that the "dean and chapter must take the consequences ;" that the sanctuary would be defiled and the monuments defaced if a vulgar vul-gar crowd were admitted free inlo the Abbey. So far from this, nothing could have been better behaved than this vulgar crowd, and the monuments have passed unscathed through thi-contact thi-contact with the people, though every one knows how much they have puttered put-tered at the hands of predatory antiquaries anti-quaries in the course of centuries. If any one desires to set what one of these archaelogical magpies is capable capa-ble of doing, he must attend a great London auction room for a few months or years, and there he will see brasses, bosses, enamels and ironwork, all filched filch-ed from ecclesiastical buildings, to swell some collector s catalogue. 'lhese are the "dangerous" classes to our public buildings and monuments, and not the great mass of sightseers who went to stare at the Abbey, and who, though they might long to touch, hdd too much seif-respect to mutilate and purloin. English paper. |