The coffin of W.E. Gladstone lying in state in Westminster Hall, attended by five men praying. Drawing by G.B. Scott after A. Kemp Tebby, 1898.

"One who saw Westminster Hall by night, and the narrow lighted space of the coffin's immediate environment almost overwhelmed by the empty darkness, like a match that is struck at nightfall on a country road, has described the scene as almost painful in its simplicity. On the last night the inner barriers round the coffin had been removed, and only the black barriers at the sides of the Hall remained. Two more candles had been added to those which originally stood at the corners of the coffin, and threw a wavering, uncertain light on the oaken coffin and its white pall and the cross at its head. Below it knelt the watchers, giving place to one another hour by hour in the post of honour and sacred duty. During the night several times one or other of Mr. Gladstone's near friends or relatives came to pray. A little before midnight Miss Helen Gladstone and Mrs. Henry Drew slipped quietly through the great northern portals, and for a space knelt in silence by the dead. On the stroke of six, when the cold northern light of the morning streamed fuall into the Hall, the last watch round the coffin began. It was shared by six priests of the Church of England, who knelt in their black cassocks continuously during the last two bouts. Outside the clatter of the traffic and the myriad footfalls of the town murmured and increased, but inside the Hall the silence was complete. … The gloom of the early morning passed away and level rays of sunlight struck across the Hall from the high eastern windows, "Powdering with gold the gloom's soft dim". "—The graphic, op. cit. p. 697 (quoting in the last sentence the poem Count Gismond by Robert Browning)