THE TOWER AND THE AMPHIBIANS

Tower Hill and its victims All Hallows, Barking Ainsworth's romance The Little Princes St. John's Chapel The Praise of Snuff The Armouries The Jewels The Tower Residences Wellclose Square The Tower Bridge Mr. Jacobs' Stories Roofs and Chimneys Pessimism in a Train Reverence for the Law The Ocean in Urbe The most interesting terminus Docks Stepney and Limehouse China in London Canal Life "Thank you, Driver" An Intruder and the mot juste.

ON the way to the Tower from Mark Lane station one crosses Tower Hill perhaps, if the traffic permits, walking over the very spot on which stood the old scaffold. When I was last there a flock of pigeons was feeding exactly where I judged it to have been that scaffold on which so many noble heads were struck from their shoulders, from Sir Thomas More and Surrey the poet to Strafford and Algernon Sidney, and a few ignoble ones, not the least of which was Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat's, the last man to be beheaded in England, the block on which he laid his naughty old neck being still to be seen, full of dents, in the Tower itself. That was in 1747. Standing here it is extraordinary to think that, comparatively speaking, so few years have passed since it was possible to behead a man publicly in broad day in the middle of a London street.

Opposite Mark Lane Station, and at the corner of Great Tower Street, which leads into Little Tower Street, and that in its turn into Eastcheap and the city proper, is All Hallows Church, whither many of the victims of the Tower Hill scaffold were carried for burial, among them the Earl of Surrey, Bishop Fisher and Archbishop Laud. All three were, however, afterwards removed elsewhere, Laud, for example, to St. John's College, Oxford. William Penn, who lived to speak contemptuously of churches as steeplehouses, was baptised here in 1644, and the bloody Judge Jeffreys, who harried Penn's sect so mercilessly, was married here to his first wife in the year following the Great Fire, which spared All. Hallows by a kind of miracle just thrusting out a tongue or two to lick up the porch and then drawing them back. The church, though it has a new spire, is, within, a fine example of medieval architecture, and its brasses are among the best that London contains. Among them is one of William Thynne and his wife, Thynne being worthy of all commendation as the man responsible for the first printed collection of Chaucer's works in 1532.

Another interesting Great Tower Street building, or rather re-building, is the Czar's Head, an inn on the same side as the church, which stands on the site of an older inn of that name to which Peter the Great, when learning at Deptford to build ships, resorted with his friends. Muscovy Court, out of Trinity Square, close by, derives its style from the same monarch. Little Tower Street has in a different way an equally unexpected association, for it was in a house there that James Thomson, the poet of "The Seasons," wrote "Summer." The new Trinity House is a very imposing building.

Harrison Ainsworth's romance "The Tower of London," which I fear I should find a very tawdry work to-day, twenty and more years ago stirred me as few novels now are able to do, and fixed the Tower for all time as a home of dark mystery. Not even the present smugness of its officialdom, the notice boards, the soldiers in its barracks, the dryness of its moat or the formal sixpenny tickets of admission, can utterly obliterate the impression of Ainsworth's pages and Cruikshank's engravings. I still expect to see Gog and Magog eating a mammoth pasty; I still look for Xit the dwarf ; and in a dark recess fancy I hear the shuddering sound of the headsman sharpening his axe. No need, however, for Ainsworth's fictions; after reading the barest outline of English history, the Tower's stones run red enough. Anne Boleyn, Katherine Howard, Lady Jane Grey, Sir Thomas More, the Earl of Essex these are a few who were beheaded in state within its walls; but what of the others who died secretly by force, like the little Princes and Sir Thomas Overbury, and those other thousands of prisoners unknown who ate their hearts out in the cells within these nine-feet walls?

The ordinary tickets admit only to the jewels and the armour, but a written application to the Governor procures an authorisation to see also the dungeons, in the company of a warder. The room in the Bloody Tower in which the little Princes were smothered is no longer shown, as it has become part of a private dwelling; but the window is pointed out, and with that husk you must be satisfied. Among the sights to which a special order entitles you is the cell in which Raleigh wrote the "History of the World," and that narrow hollow in the wall of the White Tower, known as Little Ease, in which Guy Fawkes was immured while waiting for justice and death.

St. John's Chapel, in the White Tower, has a naked simplicity beyond anything I know, and a massiveness out of all proportion to its size, which inspires both confidence and reverence. In its long life it has seen many strange and moving spectacles from the all-night vigils of the Knights of the Bath, to Brackenbury's refusal at the altar side to murder the little Princes and the renunciation by Richard II of his crown in favour of Bolingbroke. I had the history of this chapel from a gentle old Irish beef-eater who sits in a chair and talks like a book. The names of monarchs and accompanying dates fell from his tongue in a gentle torrent until I stopped it with the question "Do all the warders in the Tower take snuff?" He had never been asked this before, and it knocked all the literature and history out of him and re-established his humanity. He became instantly an Irishman and a brother, confessed to his affection for a pinch (as I had detected), and we discussed the merits of the habit as freely as if the royal body of Elizabeth of York had never lain in state within a few yards of us, and no printed notice had warned me that the place being holy I must remove my hat.

In the Tower armouries every kind of decorative use has been made of old muskets, ramrods and pistols, resulting in ingenious mural patterns which must strike the schoolboy visitor as a most awful waste of desirable material. The armouries contain also some very real weapons indeed: to students of the machinery of death they are invaluable. The evolution of the sword and gun of all nations may be traced here, in glass cases which are so catholic as to contain not only the corkscrew dagger of Java but the harpoon gun of Nantucket. I think nothing impressed me more than a long and sinister catchpole surely the most unpleasant weapon that ever assailed a man's comfort and dignity. The mode's of knights in armour cannot but add to the vividness of "Ivanhoe." Among the more recent relics is the uniform which the Duke of Wellington wore as the Constable of the Tower, and the cloak, rolled up far too tightly and squeezed under glass, in which Wolfe died on the Heights of Abraham. It should be spread out. The drums from Blenheim touch the imagination too.

But the best things about the Tower are the Tower itself its spaces and gateways, and old houses, and odd corners, and grave, hopping ravens and St. John's Chapel. Interesting as the armour no doubt is, I could easily dispense with it, for there is something very irritating in being filed past policemen in the pursuit of the interesting; and one sees better crown jewels in any pantomime. Of medieval gravity one never tires ; but medieval ostentation and gaudiness soon become unendurable. Yet I suppose more people go to the Tower to see the jewels than to see anything else. The odd fact that the infamous but courageous Colonel Blood, by his historic raid on the regalia in 1671, rose instantly from a furtive skulking subterraneous existence to a place at Court and 500 a year might have had the effect of multiplying such attempts ; but it does not seem to have done so. No one tries to steal the crown to-day. And yet precedent is rarely so much in the thief's favour.

But the Tower as a whole; that is fine. There is a jumble of wooden walls and windows on one of the ramparts overlooking the river, where I would gladly live, no matter what the duties. What are the qualifications of the Governor of the Tower I know not, but I am an applicant for the post.

London's wild beasts, which now lend excitement to Regent's Park, used to be kept at the Tower, and the old guide-books to it, a hundred and more years ago, are inclined to pay more attention to them than to history. A living lion was more to the authors of these volumes (as to the sightseers also) than many dead kings. One such book which lies before me now, dated 1778, begins with this blameless proposition: "The Desire of seeing the Antiquities and Rareties of our Country is allowed by all to be a laudable Curiosity: to point them out therefore to the Inquisitive, and to direct their Attention to those Things, that best deserve Notice, cannot be denied its degree of Merit." The guide then plunges bravely into history, but quickly emerges to describe, with a degree of spirit rare in the remainder of his work, the inhabitants of the menagerie. The chief animals at, that time were the lions Dunco, Pompey, Dido, Caesar, Miss Fanny, Hector, Nero, Cleony and Helen, and the tigers Sir Richard, Jenny, Nancy, and Miss Groggery, who, "though a tigress, discovers no marks of ferocity." The old custom of calling the lions after the living monarchs of the day seems just then to have been in abeyance. In 1834 the menagerie was transferred to Regent's Park: but I think they might have left a cage or two for old sake's sake.

From the Tower I walked down what used to be the Ratcliffe Highway, where De Quincey's favourite murderer Williams (who must, said George Dyer, have been rather an eccentric character) indulged in his famous holocaust a hundred years ago. It is now St. George's Street, and one reaches it by the wall of St. Katherine's Dock, through the scent of pepper and spice, and past the gloomy opening of Nightingale Lane, which has no reference to the beautiful singing bird of May, but takes its name from the Knighten Guild founded by King Edgar in the days when London was Danish.

I returned to Mark Lane station by way of Wellclose Square, which saw the birth of Thomas Day, the author of "Sandford and Merton," and was the site of the Magdalen Chapel of the famous Dr. Dodd, who found Beauties in Shakespeare and was the indefatigable friend of London's unfortunates until he took to luxury and excesses, became a forger, and died, as we saw in an earlier chapter, at Tyburn Tree. The square was once the centre of Denmark in London and is still associated with the sea, a school for seamen's children standing where the old Danish church stood, and seamen's institutes abounding hereabouts. Much of the square's ancient character has been preserved, and on one house are still to be seen some very attractive bas-reliefs of children pursuing the arts.

Of the Mint and its streams of silver and gold I have written in "London Revisited." It is an interesting place to see, but I have not been there since sovereigns and half sovereigns were withdrawn.