In the Poets' Church

Today I dropped in on the ironically named St Giles in the Fields, Bloomsbury, which now stands surrounded not by fields but by hideous and very tall buildings, including Centre Point, not to mention roaring traffic and hordes of people dashing by. It's a rather fine, galleried and gilded mid-18th-century church, nicely restored in the mid-20th, and has a few monuments from the old church that preceded the present one. The best is that of Lady Frances Kniveton, with its white marble effigy (above), which dates from the 1660s and is probably by Edward Marshall or his son Joshua, both of whom were capable of good work. The figure of Lady Frances, lying in her rather sketchily realised shroud, is a little bland (and not in the same league as Nicholas Stone's Lady Berkeley at Cranford or Lady Bruce at Exton), but it has a certain quiet beauty.
  St Giles is known as the Poets' Church and has a surprising number of poetical associations. George Chapman, the translator of Homer and inspirer of Keats, has a memorial, erected by his friend Inigo Jones. John Milton brought his second daughter, Mary, to be baptised in the old church. In 1818, the atheist Shelley and his friend Byron had William and Clara (Shelley) and Clara Allegra (Byron) baptised in the new church. Edward Herbert, brother of the more famous George, is buried in the crypt. And Andrew Marvell, who lived nearby and is buried under the South aisle, has a memorial tablet inscribed with what must be one of the most fulsome epitaphs any English poet ever received. He was, according to this, 'a man so endowed by Nature, so improved by Education, Study, and Travel, so consummated by Experience, that, joining the peculiar graces of Wit and Learning, with a singular penetration and strength of judgment; and exercising all these in the whole course of his life, with an unutterable steadiness in the ways of Virtue, he became the ornament and example of his age, beloved by good men, feared by bad, admired by all, though imitated by few; and scarce paralleled by any...'  Phew – really?