She had a great deal to go through with that day. She must have rehearsed well, or she would have been confused by the multiform ceremonials of that grand spectacular performance. The scene, as she entered Westminster Abbey, might well have startled her out of her serene calm, but it didn't. On each side of the nave, reaching from the western door to the organ screen, were the galleries, erected for the spectators. These were all covered with crimson cloth fringed with gold. Underneath them were lines of foot-guards, very martial-looking, fellows. The old stone floor, worn with the tread of Kings' coronations and funeral processions, was covered with matting, and purple and crimson cloth. Immediately under the central tower of the Abbey, inside the choir, five steps from the floor, on a carpet of purple and gold, was a platform covered with cloth of gold, and on it was the golden "Chair of Homage." Within the chancel, near the altar, stood the stiff, quaint old chair in I which all the sovereigns of England since Edward the Confessor have been crowned. Cloth of gold quite concealed the "chunk of old red sandstone," called the "stone of Scone," on which the ancient Scottish Kings were crowned, and which the English seem to keep and use for luck. There were galleries on galleries upholstered in crimson cloth, and splendid tapestries, wherein sat members of Parliament and foreign Princes and Embassadors. In the organ loft were singers in white, and instrumental performers in scarlet --all looking very fine and festive; and up very high was a band of trumpeters, whose music, pealing over the heads of the people, produced, at times, a wonderful effect.
Fashionable people had got up early for once. Many were at the Abbey doors long before 5 o'clock, and when the Queen arrived at 11:30, hundreds of delicate ladies in full evening-dress, had been waiting for her for seven long hours. The foreign Princes and Embassadors were in gorgeous costumes; and there was the Lord Mayor in all his glory, blinding to behold. His most formidable rival was Prince Esterhazy, who sparkled with costly jewels from his head down to his boots-looking as though he had been snowed upon with pearls, and had also been caught out in a rain of diamonds, and had come in dripping. All these grand personages and the Peers and Peeresses were so placed as to have a perfect view of the part of the minster in which the coronation took place-called, in the programme, "the Theatre."