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ART. IX.-1. The History and Antiquities of the Tower of London, &c. &c. By John Bayley, F.R.S., &c. Second Edition. Jennings and Chaplin.

2. A Short History of the Tower of London, including a Particular Detail of its Interesting Curiosities; with a Brief Account of many of the most celebrated Kings of England, Noblemen, and others, whose Figures in Armour, and sitting on Horseback, are exhibited in the Horse Armoury. pp. 28. Hodgson, Armoury Ticket Office. 1838. [The Current Tower Guide.]

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TO judge from the way in which writers in general have been accustomed to speak of the Tower, one would conclude that it is nothing but a sturdy piece of antiquity, holding pikes and regalia, regarded in the same light and with the same respect by everybody who thinks of it, and destined to stand where it does for ever, indestructible as royalty and the beef-eaters. although this is, in truth, its general bearing in the public mind, it is a good deal modified according to the class of the thinkers. If the antiquary conceives of it always as of a picture in a book, and a thing connected with the days of Crecy and Poitiers, castle with a moat to it and portcullis, like any "real castle,❞— the inhabitants of the district, though they realize the castle with their eyes, have no such veneration for it; nor have its own inhabitants. The former regard it as the huge place next door, for whose neighbourhood few but contractors are the better, and with whose soldiers there are occasional squabbles. To the inmates it is a dull, shut-up quarter, locking up soon at night, and worse than a "drug" as to anything curious. The citizens, for the most part, think of it as a place which they can see when they like, and therefore do not much care to see. With country people and maid-servants its glory is diminished, since it no longer contains the "beasties," though they retain sufficient respect for it as a London sight, and the place that contains the armoury and the kings on horseback. Soldiers think of it as quarters. The engineer has a respect for it as a strong-hold and an imposing antiquity, and a contempt for it as a fort to overawe. He knows that it might do very well as a defence, but is good for nothing as an offence, especially since the new era of Parisian barricades. Lastly, the dandy at the West End holds it to be a building in some unattainable remoteness of the East, vulgar to go to see, but respectable inasmuch as it has a "constable" to it, and a salary.

There is yet one class, however, not of conventional but of

real thinkers, or of persons whose real feeling stands them instead of thought; and to these, the Tower, though it does not impose on them as a place of strength, and to say the truth, is not unvulgarized by the recollection of the poor stirred-up beasts, and the sorry payments for admission yet existing, is a place venerable for its years, and deeply interesting for the mass of human emotion, and the mortal and majestic agonies, that have taken place within its walls. Here the most heroical spirits have been sent to die. Here fortitude has withered, like an oak-tree of flesh, unconquerable but by time. Here common captivity has its heart out. gnawn Here innocence and beauty, nay, girlhood, has had its slender neck divided on the worse than butcher's block. Here ambition,-here the lord of everybody, the sovereign protector of realms,-has come to an end no better than that of the ox that was slain last week to feed his household.

The Tower is in itself a curiosity,-in its local state and circumference. It is, in fact, a little town by itself, isolated by walls and a moat, occupying a space of upwards of twelve acres, and containing, with numerous other buildings, a high street which runs round the walls like an inner-ring, consisting of barracks and officers' houses. The other buildings comprise more of these houses, together with armouries and an ancient chapel. There is a platform or open space (where the block used to be set up), adorned with an avenue of trees; and in the midst of all, stands the Tower, properly so called; that is to say, the principal original building, officially known by the name of the White Tower, topped with four turrets, and anciently occupied as a palace. The Henrys and Edwards occasionally lived in it, always spent some time in it on their accession to the throne, and invariably proceeded from it to be crowned. Hence the Constable is still a grand coronation officer. The average number of constantly residing inhabitants, including women and children, is estimated at seven hundred; and there is a constant like number, or thereabouts, of military, quartered from suecessive regiments. The gates close, like those of a college, at a particular hour at night,-eleven o'clock; and a tranquil formality pervades the whole place, night and day.

Upon issuing from Tower street or the Minories, the place presents itself in a very favourable point of view. It is not huddled up, like St Paul's and other buildings in the interior of the city. You look across an open space, and see it standing like a little city by itself in old times, walled and moated, with the castle, or keep, rising high in the middle; and beyond are the masts of the shipping in the river. To an eye aceus

tomed to none but modern and inland objects, the sight is very striking. Chivalry and feudality present themselves at once before you. There is the ditch, and a broad one too, to ford before you can get at the walls; there are the walls, thick and high, and embattelled; above these are the tops of unknown buildings, the houses and palaces of the little isolated city; and above all is the keep aforesaid, or great tower, very tall and massy, and crowned with its four turrets. You may think of all this, if you will, in as modern a light as possible;-of the ditch, as needless of the walls, as enclosing soldiers of the 10th Foot, and Major Smith, who drives a gig;—of the houses, as containing a set of as peaceful gentlemen as ever lived, with pens behind their ears, and salaries "besides coals and candles;" and of the tower and the whole place, as a thing to see "curiosities" in,—a kind of great stony show-box,-where faces of wax-work stare out of armour on horseback, and toys called regalia are to be made visible, and you pay for the sight, as little children do the showman in the streets. But time, and size, and power will assert their rights over the imagination. The place frowns upon you with its hard old strength, and its cruel and stately memories. You think of Raleigh, of Essex, of poor Anne Bullen, of Henry the Eighth (as wide and hard as itself); of Julius Cæsar, its traditional, and William the First, its certain founder; and if you are in the humour to be co-eval by sea as by land, you may imagine those tops of vessels in the river to be fresh from the Crusades, or from the Saracen ports of Spain, with burthens of silks and spices from the merchants of Abdoulrahman, or swarthy news from the confines of the Great Khan.

It did not baulk us at all in these dreams, when on crossing the hill the other day from Tower street aforesaid, we entered the gate on the right hand, and bought our ticket for the show. In the Ticket Office, or attending at the door of it, are first encountered the Warders, or Yeomen (one of whom is to be your showman), dressed in the Henry the Eighth costume, which the latter word implies to metropolitan ears; and in the Waiting Room, you stay till the requisite number of sight-seers (a halfhour's collection) have come together, to set the Yeoman in motion at the head of them. With successive parties of this sort he and his fellows are occupied from ten o'clock till four.

The sights usually seen are the armouries; the admittance to which is now reduced from several shillings to one. To these, many, but by no means all visitors, add that of the regalia, which costs (as it did before) a shilling for the person that shows it, and one more (not from each individual, but from the whole party collectively) for the yeoman who brings you to the

door, and who has shown you the armouries, supposing your visit is both to armouries and regalia.

The yeoman, whose business it was to conduct us, was himself a curiosity, and a very respectable one. He is one of a set of men who are selected from the military for their good conduct, and rewarded with part of the profits of this employment. Our conductor was Sergeant John Lund, a robust pleasantlooking man, between forty and fifty, uneducated, but with a great deal of that natural good sense and feeling, which gifts a man with a sort of instinctive good breeding, or tact and propriety of behaviour. He wore, and doubtless still wears, having been a hale, hearty individual some two months ago, a couple of silver medals, one for having been at the battle of Waterloo, and the other (which, without any disrespect to the first, he reasonably values more, because accident could have no hand in its bestowal) for "good conduct during a service of twenty years." His grammar is not the best in the world, and his acquaintance with the Kings and others whose posthumous horsemanship he exhibits, is by rote; but grammar would probably not have been learnt without schooling by the Bishop of London himself (whose image comes into our mind from a certain mixture of jovial stoutness and respectable military decision, not unlike the Sergeant's), and history is not to be studied in what pretends to be nothing but a show. Mr Lund's business is to state the who and what of the things shown; to give neither too little time, nor too much, to the beholders; and to hit a nice point between respectful attention to their questions or remarks, and a tacit, unpresuming claim to seriousness towards his own:-and he does all this with a simple, manly decorum, and sober good-humour.

Quitting the waiting-room, under the guidance of the gallant Sergeant, we crossed the open ground of the place through certain archways, and arrived at our first object of curiosity-the HORSE-ARMOURY.

"Here," says the catalogue," in one spacious room, 150 feet by 33, are arranged, in regular and chronological order, no less a number than 22 equestrian figures, comprising many of the most celebrated Kings of England, accompanied by their favourite lords and men of rank, all of them, together with their horses, in the armour of the respective periods when they flourished; many, indeed, in the identical suits in which they appeared while living. Along the centre of the ceiling, immediately over each figure, is a Gothic arch, in the centre of which is suspended a banner, which in gold letters, on both sides, expresses the name, rank, and date of existence of the personage represented. The horses stand, mounted by their riders, almost without any visible support, on a floor of

brick, raised a little from the adjoining boarded flooring, which is appropriated to the spectators. This judicious arrangement converts the remaining parts of the room into an extensive promenade; between which and the walls, there has, notwithstanding, been found sufficient space to insert many interesting and appropriate curiosities, which shall hereafter be described. The walls and ceiling of the room are also decorated with a profusion of pieces of armour, arms, and military weapons, with the dates of the time neatly inscribed thereon. The imposing magnificence and deep interest which pervades this scene, is probably unequalled."

The scene is undoubtedly interesting, and there is nothing exactly of the kind, we believe, in the world. Dr Meyrick, celebrated for his knowledge of the antiquities of armour, arranged it; and the assignment to him of this task originated, we believe, with the present Constable of the Tower, the Duke of Wellington, a man of cool and sound judgment where party feelings are not concerned, and of a superiority worthy of his fame even to those, compared with almost every other Tory. But it is a pity that the faces of the personages on horseback claim to be likenesses, without attaining as great a completeness in that respect as might surely have been possible; thus reminding us too much of an ordinary show, and of the old wax-work exhibitions of Mrs Salmon. The art of wax-work, as applied to human portraiture, is either incapable of attaining its object, or, if these are to be taken as its best specimens, is yet in its infancy. It makes the face look at once dead and alive, fresh and ghastly; and a more dreary set of robust spectres on horseback is not to be conceived than the personages here present, if you regard their countenances only. Surely some better mode, or material, is discoverable for doing justice to resemblances of this sort. Would not even a good unaffected carving in wood be preferable? Would it not allow of more detail, of more individual likeness, without pretending to that unattainable reality of life, which is never anything better than a death with its eyes. open? Nay, the very death does not succeed; it is no human death; the flesh is not flesh, alive or dead; or if flesh, it is flesh converted into that ultra-mortal substance called adipocire, or wax-fat; by which, under certain circumstances, human bodies become transferable into relationship with those of candles.

Imperial monarchs, dead, and turn'd to that,

Might look indeed like these, and shake us as they sat. Very interesting, nevertheless, is this long and noble room, with its troop of royal and other horsemen, which you leisurely inspect as though you were a field-officer of dead kings, and