exception of St. Angelo in Rome-compare against the Tower. The Bastile is gone; the Bargello has become a museum; the Piombi are removed from the Doge's roof. Vincennes, Spandau, Spilberg, Magdeburg, are all modern in comparison with a jail from which Ralph Flambard escaped so long ago as the year 1100, the date of the first crusade.

Standing on Tower Hill, looking down on the dark lines of wall-picking out keep and turret, bastion and ballium, chapel and belfry -the jewel-house, the armoury, the mounts, the casemates, the open leads-the Bye-ward Gate, the Belfry, the Bloody Tower-the whole edifice seems alive with story; the story of a nation's highest splendour, its deepest misery, and its darkest shame. The soil beneath your feet is richer in blood than many a great battlefield; for out upon this sod has been poured, from generation to generation, a stream of the noblest life in our land. Should you have come to this spot alone, in the early day, when the Tower is noisy with martial doings, you may haply catch, in the hum which rises from the ditch and issues from the wall below you -broken by roll of drum, by blast of bugle, by tramp of soldiers-some echoes, as it were, of a far-off time; some hints of a May-day revel; of a state execution; of a royal entry. You may catch some sound which recalls the thrum of a queen's virginal, the cry of a victim on the rack, the laughter of a bridal feast. For all these sights and sounds-the dance of love and the dance of death- —are part of that gay and tragic memory which clings around the Tower.

From the reign of Stephen down to that of Henry of Richmond, Cæsar's Tower (the great Norman keep, now called the White Tower) was a main part of the royal palace; and for that large interval of time the story of the White Tower is in some sort that of our English society as well as of our English kings. Here were kept the royal wardrobe and the royal jewels, and hither come with their goodly wares, the tiremen, the goldsmiths, the chasers and embroiderers, from Flanders, Italy, and Almaigne. Close by were the Mint, the lions' dens, the old archery-grounds, the Court of King's Bench, the Court of Common Pleas, the queen's gardens, the royal banqueting hall; so that art and trade, science and manners, literature and law, sport and politics, find themselves equally at home.

Two great architects designed the main parts of the Tower: Gundulf the Weeper and Henry the Builder; one a poor Norman monk, the other a great English king.

VOL. IV.

Gundulf, a Benedictine friar, had, for that age, seen a great deal of the world; for he had not only lived in Rouen and Caen, but had travelled in the East. Familiar with the glories of Saracenic art, no less than with the Norman simplicities of Bec, St. Ouen, and St. Etienne; a pupil of Lanfranc, a friend of Anselm; he had been employed in the monastery of Bec to marshal, with the eye of an artist, all the pictorial ceremonies of his church. But he was chiefly known in that convent as a weeper. No monk at Bec could cry so often and so much as Gundulf. He could weep with those who wept; nay, he could weep with those who sported; for his tears welled forth from what seemed to be an unfailing source.

As the price of his exile from Bec, Gundulf received the crozier of Rochester, in which city he rebuilt the cathedral, and perhaps designed the castle, since the great keep on the Medway has a sister's likeness to the great keep on the Thames. His works in London were-the White Tower, the first St. Peter's Church; and the old barbican, afterwards known as the Hall Tower, and now used as the jewel-house.

The cost of these works was great; the discontent caused by them was sore. Ralph, Bishop of Durham, the able and rapacious minister who had to raise the money, was hated and reviled by the Commons with peculiar bitterness of heart and phrase. He was called Flambard, or Firebrand. He was represented as a devouring lion. Still the great edifice grew up; and Gundulf, who lived to the age of fourscore, saw his great keep completed from basement to battlement.

Henry the Third, a prince of epical fancies, as Corffe, Conway, Beaumaris, and many other fine poems in stone attest, not only spent much of his time in the Tower, but much of his money in adding to its strength and beauty. Adam de Lamburn was his master mason; but Henry was his own chief clerk of the works. The Water Gate, the embanked wharf, the Cradle Tower, the Lantern, which he made his bedroom and private closet, the Galleyman Tower, and the first wall, appear to have been his gifts. But the prince who did so much for Westminster Abbey, not content with giving stone and piles to the home in which he dwelt, enriched the chambers with frescoes and sculpture, the chapels with carving and glass; making St. John's Chapel in the White Tower splendid with saints, St. Peter's Church on the Tower Green musical with bells. In the Hall Tower, from which a passage led through the great hall into the king's bedroom in the Lantern, he built a tiny chapel for his private use-a

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chapel which served for the devotion of his successors until Henry the Sixth was stabbed to death before the cross. Sparing neither skill nor gold to make the great fortress worthy of his art, he sent to Purbeck for marble, and to Caen for stone. The dabs of lime, the spawls of flint, the layers of brick, which deface the walls and towers in too many places, are of either earlier or later times. The marble shafts, the noble groins, the delicate traceries, are Henry's work. Traitor's Gate, one of the noblest arches in the world, was built by him; in short, nearly all that is purest in art is traceable to his reign.

Edward the First may be added, at a distance, to the list of builders. In his reign the original church of St. Peter fell into ruin; the wrecks were carted away, and the present edifice was built. The bill of costs for clearing the ground is still extant in Fetter Lane. Twelve men, who were paid twopence a day wages, were employed on the work for twenty days. The cost of pulling down the old chapel was forty-six shillings and eightpence; that of digging foundations for the new chapel forty shillings. That chapel has suffered from wardens and lieutenants; yet the shell is of very fine Norman work.

From the days of Henry the Builder down to those of Henry of Richmond, the Tower, as the strongest place in the south of England, was by turns the magnificent home and the miserable jail of all our princes. Here Richard the Second held his court, and gave up his crown. Here Henry the Sixth was murdered. Here the Duke of Clarence was drowned in wine. Here King Edward and the Duke of York were slain by command of Richard. Here Margaret of Salisbury was hacked into pieces on the block.

Henry of Richmond kept his royal state in the Tower, receiving his ambassadors, counting his angels, making presents to his bride, Elizabeth of York. Among other gifts to that lady on her nuptial day was a royal book of verse, composed by a prisoner in the keep.

Turning through a sally-port in the Byeward Gate, you cross the south arm of the ditch, and come out on the wharf,-a strip of strand in front of the fortress won from the river, and kept in its place by masonry and piles. This wharf, the work of Henry the Builder, is one of the wonders of his reign; for the whole strip of earth had to be seized from the Thames, and covered from the daily ravage of its tides. At this bend of the river the scour is hard, the roll enormous. Piles had to be driven into the mud and silt; rubble had to be thrown in

between these piles; and then the whole mass united with fronts and bars of stone. All Adam de Lamburn's skill was taxed to resist the weight of water, yet keep the sluices open by which he fed the ditch. Most of all was this the case when the king began to build a new barbican athwart the sluice. This work, of which the proper name was for many ages the Water Gate, commands the only outlet from the Tower into the Thames; spanning the ditch and sweeping the wharf, both to the left and right. So soon as the wharf was taken from the river-bed, this work became essential to the defensive line.

London folk felt none of the king's pride in the construction of this great wharf and barbican. In fact, these works were in the last degree unpopular, and on news of any mishap occurring to them the Commons went almost mad with joy. Once they sent to the king a formal complaint against these works. Henry assured his people that the wharf and Water Gate would not harm their city. Still the citizens felt sore. Then, on St. George's night, 1240, while the people were at prayer, the Water Gate and wall fell down, no man knew why. No doubt the tides were high that spring, and the soft silt of the river gave way beneath the wash. Anyhow they fell.

Henry, too great a builder to despair, began again; this time with a better plan; yet on the self-same night of the ensuing year his barbican crashed down into the river, one mass of stones. A monk of St. Albans, who tells the tale, asserts that a priest who was passing near the fortress saw the spirit of an archbishop, dressed in his robes, holding a cross, and attended by the spirit of a clerk, gazing sternly on these new works. As the priest came up. the figure spake to the masons, "Why build ye these?" As he spoke, he struck the walls sharply with the holy cross, on which they reeled and sank into the river, leaving a wreath of smoke behind. The priest was too much scared to accost the more potent spirit; but he turned to the humble clerk, and asked him the archbishop's name. "St. Thomas the Martyr," said the shade. The priest, growing bolder, asked him why the Martyr had done this deed! "St. Thomas," said the spirit, "by birth a citizen, mislikes these works, because they are raised in scorn and against the public right. For this cause he has thrown them down be yond the tyrant's power to restore them."

But the shade was not strong enough to scare the king. Twelve thousand marks had been spent on that heap of ruins; yet the bar bican being necessary to his wharf, the Builder,

on the morrow of his second mishap, was again at work, clearing away the rubbish, driving in the piles, and laying in a deeper bed the foundation-stones. This time his work was done so well that the walls of his gateway have never shrunk, and are as firm to-day as the earth on which they stand.

The ghost informed the priest that the two most popular saints in our calendar, the Confessor and the Martyr, had undertaken to make war upon these walls. "Had they been built," said the shade, for the defence of London, and in order to find food for masons and joiners, they might have been borne; but they are built against the poor citizens; and if St. Thomas had not destroyed them, the Confessor would have swept them away.'

The names of these popular saints still cling to the Water Gate. One of the rooms, fitted up as an oratory, and having a piscina still perfect, is called the Confessor's Chapel; and the barbican itself, instead of bearing its official name of Water Gate, is only known as St. Thomas's Tower.

The whole wharf, twelve hundred feet in length, lay open to the Thames, except a patch of ground at the lower end, near the Iron Gate, leading towards the hospital of St. Catharine the Virgin, where a few sheds and magazines were built at an early date. Except these sheds, the wharf was clear. When cannon came into use, they were laid along the ground, as well as trained on the walls and the mural towers.

Three ascents marked, as it were, the river front-the Queen's Stair, the Water Way, and the Galleyman Stair. The Queen's Stair, the landing-place of royal princes, and of such great persons as came to the Tower on state affairs, lay beneath the Bye-ward Gate and the Belfry, having a passage into the fortress by a bridge and postern, through the Bye-ward Tower into Water Lane. The Water Way was that cutting through the bank which passed under St. Thomas's Tower to the flight of steps in Water Lane; the entrance popularly known as Traitor's Gate. The Galleyman Stair lay under the Cradle Tower, by which there was a private entrance into the royal quarter. This stair was not much used, except when the services of Traitor's Gate were out of order. Then prisoners who could not enter by the approach of honour were landed at the Galleyman Stair.

Lying open to the river and to the streets, the wharf was a promenade, a place of traffic and of recreation, to which folk resorted on high days and fair days. Men who loved

| sights were pretty sure to find something worth seeing at either the Queen's Stair or Traitor's Gate. All personages coming to the Tower in honour were landed at the Queen's Stair; all personages coming in disgrace were pushed through the Traitor's Gate. Now a royal barge, with a queen on board, was going forth in her bravery of gold and pennons; now a lieutenant's boat, returning with a culprit in the stern, a headsman standing at his side, holding in his hand the fatal axe.

Standing on the bank, now busy with a new life, these pictures of an old time start into being like a mystic writing on the wall. Two of these scenes come back with warm rich colouring to the inner eye.

But

Now it is London in the reign of that Henry the Builder, who loved to adorn the fortress in which he dwelt. Whose barge is moored at yon stair, with the royal arms? What men are those with tabard and clarion? Who is that proud and beautiful woman, her fair face fired with rage, who steps into her galley, but whose foot appears to scorn the plank on which it treads? She is the queen; wife of the great builder; Elinor of Provence, called by her minstrels Elinor la Belle. A poetess, a friend of singers, a lover of music, she is said to have brought song and art into the English court from her native land. The first of our laureates came in her train. She has flushed the palace with jest and joust, with tinkle of citherns, with clang of horns. the queen has faults, for which her gracious talent and her peerless beauty fail to atone. Her greed is high, her anger ruthless. Her court is filled with an outcry of merchants who have been mulcted of queen-geld, a wrangle of friars who have been robbed by her kith and kin, a roar of tiremen and jewellers clamorous for their debts, a murmur of knights and barons protesting against her loans, a clatter of poor Jews objecting to be spoiled. Despite her gifts of birth and wit, Elinor la Belle is the most unpopular princess in the world. She has been living at the Tower, which her husband loves; but she feels that her palace is a kind of jail; she wishes to get away, and she has sent for her barge and watermen, hoping to escape from her people and to breathe the free air of her Windsor home.

Will the Commons let her go? Proudly her barge puts off. The tabards bend and the clarions blare. But the Commons, who wait her coming on London Bridge, dispute her passage, and drive her back with curses, crying, "Drown the witch! Drown the witch!" Unable to pass the bridge, Elinor has to turn her

Her son, the young and fiery Edward, never forgets this insult to his mother; by-and-by he will seek revenge for it on Lewes field; and by mad pursuit of his revenge he will lose the great fight and imperil his father's crown.

Again: it is London in the reign of bluff King Hal-the husband of two fair wives. The river is alive with boats; the air is white with smoke; the sun overhead is burning with golden May. Thousands on thousands of spectators dot the banks; for to-day a bride is coming home to the king, the beauty of whose face sets old men's fancies and young men's eyes agog. On the wharf, near the Queen's Stair, stands a burly figure, tall beyond common men; broad in chest and strong in limb; dressed in a doublet of gold and crimson, a cap and plume, shoes with rosettes and diamonds, a hanger by his side, a George upon his breast. It is the king, surrounded by dukes and earls, awaiting the arrival of a barge, in the midst of blaring trumpets and exploding sakers. A procession sweeps along; stealing up from Green- | wich, with plashing oars and merry strains, fifty great boats, with a host of wherries on their flanks; a vessel firing guns in front, and a long arrear of craft behind.

From the first barge lands the lord-mayor; from the second trips the bride; from the rest stream out the picturesque city companies. Cannons roar, and bells fling out a welome to the queen; for this is not simply a great day in the story of one lovely woman; but a great day in the story of English life. Now is the morning time of a new era; for on this bright May

"The gospel light first shines from Boleyn's eyes," and men go mad with hope of things which are yet to come.

The king catches that fair young bride in his arms, kisses her soft check, and bears her in through the Bye-ward Tower.

The picture fades from view, and presently reappears. Is it the same? The queen-the stair-the barge-the crowd of men-all these are here. Yet the picture is not the same. No burly Henry stands by the stair; no guns disturb the sky; no blast of trumpets greets the royal barge; no train of aldermen and masters waits upon the queen. The lovely face looks older by a dozen years; yet scarcely three have passed since that fair form was clasped in the king's arms, kissed, and carried by the bridge. This time she is a prisoner, charged with having done such things as pen

not to her lord only, but to her womanhood, and to the King of kings.

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When she alights on the Queen's Stair, she turns to Sir William Kingston, Constable of the Tower, and asks, “Must I go into a dungeon?" No, madam," says the constable; "you will lie in the same room which you occupied before." She falls on her knees. "It is too good for me," she cries; and then weeps for a long time, lying on the cold stones, with all the people standing by in tears. She begs to have the sacrament in her own room, that she may pray with a pure heart; saying, she is free from sin, and that she is, and has always been, the king's true wedded wife.

"Shall I die without justice?" she inquires. "Madam," says Kingston, "the poorest subject would have justice." The lady only laughs a feeble laugh.

Other, and not less tragic, scenes drew crowds to the Water Way from the Thames.

Beneath this arch has moved a long procession of our proudest peers, our fairest women. our bravest soldiers, our wittiest poets-Buckingham and Strafford; Lady Jane Grey, the Princess Elizabeth; William Wallace, David Bruce; Surrey, Raleigh-names in which the splendour, poetry, and sentiment of our national story are embalmed. Most of them left it high in rank and rich in life, to return, by the same dark passage, in a few brief hours poorer than the beggars who stood shivering on the bank; in the eyes of the law, and in the words of their fellows, already dead.

From this gateway went the barge of that Duke of Buckingham, the rival of Wolsey, the last permanent High-constable of England. Buckingham had not dreamed that an offence so slight as his could bring into the dust so proud a head; for his offence was nothing: some silly words which he had bandied lightly in the Rose, a city tavern, about the young king's journey into France. He could not see that his head was struck because it moved so high; nay, his proud boast that if his enemies sent him to the Tower, ten thousand friends would storm the walls to set him free, was perhaps the occasion of his fall. When sentence of death was given, he marched back to his barge, where Sir Thomas Lovel, then constable, stood ready to hand him to the seat of honour. "Nay," said the duke to Lovel, "not so now. When I came to Westminster I was Lord High-constable and Duke of Buckingham; now I am but poor Edward Stafford."

Landed at the Temple Stair, he was marched along Fleet Street, through St. Paul's Church

yard, and by way of Cheap to the Tower; the axe borne before him all the way; Sir William Sandys holding him by the right arm, Sir Nicholas Vaux by the left. A band of Augus tine friars stood praying round the block; and when his head had fallen into the dust they bore his remains to St. Austin's Church.

On these steps, too, beneath this Water Gate, Elizabeth, then a fair young girl, with gentle feminine face and golden hair, was landed by her jealous sister's servants. The day was Sunday-Palm Sunday-with a cold March rain coming down, and splashing the stones with mud. She could not land without soiling her feet and clothes, and for a moment she refused to leave her barge. Sir John Gage, the constable, and his guards, stood by to receive her. "Are all these harnessed men for me?" she asked. "No, madam," said Sir John. 'Yea," she replied, "I know it is so." Then she stood up in her boat and leaped on shore. As she set foot on the stone steps, she exclaimed, in a spirit prouder than her looks -for in her youth she had none of that leonine beauty of her later years-"Here landeth as true a subject, being a prisoner, as ever landed at these stairs; and before thee, O God, I speak it." Perhaps she was thinking of her mother, who had landed on the neighbouring wharf. Anne had fallen on her knees on these cold stones, and here had called on God to help her, as she was not guilty of the things of which she stood accused. In those two attitudes of appeal one reads the nature of these two proud and gentle women, each calling Heaven to witness her innocence of crimeElizabeth defiant, erect; Anne suppliant, on her knees.

THE WEAVER AND HIS SHADOW.

BY WALTER THORNBURY.

Beside a dying woman,

A pale man plied the loom,

The buzz of the wheel and treddle

Filled all the squalid room.

It drowned the groans of the children,

That loom, with its robe of state;

Its threads of pink and silver
Shine bright as a coffin-plate,
Whirr-deedle-deedle-deedle,
Gay as a coffin-plate.

Deep, in the thickening twilight,
Another weaver sits;

A grizzly thing of nothing but bones,
Weaving and singing by fits.

His woof is black as a dead man's pall,

And spotted with poor man's tears; He sings a dirge with the sob of a child, A tale of passion and fears; Whirr-deedle-deedle-deedle, A tale of passion and fears.

His thin hands move with a madman's speed, Though weak for lack of bread;

He chokes to hear the dying groan

Of his wife, who's all but dead. But the costly robe of the duchess, The robe of pomp and state, Must be done this very evening, Not a moment after eight. Whirr-deedle-deedle-deedle, Not a moment after eight.

A thousand swift feet dancing,

Jewels, and silk, and flowers, Bright smiles of love and greeting, None there to count the hours; And, in the midst, the duchess

Moves like a sceptred queen, With never a thought of coffin or shroud, Or the strips of the turf so green, Whirr-deedle-deedle-deedle, Or the strips of the turf so green.

"I REMEMBER."

I remember, I remember
The house where I was born,
The little window where the sun
Came peeping in at morn;
He never came a wink too soon,
Nor brought too long a day;
But now I often wish the night
Had borne my breath away!

I remember, I remember
The roses red and white,
The violets and the lily-cups-
Those flowers made of light:
The lilacs where the robins built,
And where my brother set
The laburnum on his birth-day—
The tree is living yet!

I remember, I remember

Where I was used to swing,

And thought the air would rush as fresh

To swallows on the wing;

-My spirit flew on feathers then,

That is so heavy now;

And summer pool could hardly cool
The fever on my brow!