with the "Water Gate," the "Lantern," and the "Cradle Tower;" he adorned St. John's Chapel in it with frescoes, and he built a private chapel on a smaller scale for himself. Edward I., too, in his day, was a great benefactor to the Tower; and under his auspices the adjoining church of St. Peter's was rebuilt and enlarged. During the next two centuries, as being one of the strongest, if not the strongest edifice in the south of England, the Tower became by turns "the magnificent home or the miserable jail" of nearly all our princes. Here Richard II. held his court, and gave up his crown. Here Henry VI. was murdered; here the Duke of Clarence was drowned in wine; here King Edward V. and the Duke of York were slain by command of Richard. Here Margaret of Salisbury suffered her tragic fate. Here, too, at a later date, happened other occurrences equally sad and equally memorable: but these we must not anticipate.

Our readers must not forget that the Tower was (and still is) divided into two main parts, called here, as they are at Windsor, the "inner" and "outer" wards. The Inner Ward, or royal quarter, of which Gundulph was the planner, formed the original fortress, and still is the larger part of the entire design. The Outer Ward, which is mostly of later date, not older than the reign of Henry III., was open to the common people; it extended between the White Tower and the river, including in its circuit the Traitors' Gate, and the Great Hall close by, which was used for the sittings of the Court of Common Pleas-the Court of King's Bench being held in the royal quarters. These are facts which Mr. Dixon has been at considerable pains to establish, and which he has been the first to establish. the border land of these two Wards stood the Hall Tower, the same which we have already mentioned as that in which Henry III. built his private chapel, and in which he was murdered by the Duke of Gloucester. After Henry's death, this tower, Mr. Dixon tells us, was used as a paper office, and was known for ages afterwards as the "Record Tower."

On

Facing the river, to the south of the White Tower, was the wharf, which even 700 years ago served as a place of recreation as well as traffic. It appears, indeed, to have been a fashionable promenade on high days and holidays, and no doubt attracted the citizens of London, their wives, daughters, sons, and apprentices, on Sunday afternoons. At the time of which we speak, Mr. Dixon observes,—

"Men who loved sights were pretty sure to find something worth seeing at either the Queen's Stairs or the Traitors' Gate. All personages who came to the Tower in honour were landed at the Queen's Stairs; all coming in disgrace were pushed through the Traitors'

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, and a headsman standing at his side, holding in his hand the fatal axe.'

We have not time or space at our command to follow Mr. Dixon through the many successive scenes which he brings before us in the thirty-odd chapters of his work. We are, however, especially delighted with his sketches of "The Good Lord Cobham," "The King and Cardinal Fisher," "The Nine Days Queen" (Lady Jane Grey), "The Pilgrimage of Grace," "The Murder of Northumberland," and "Princess Margaret." Nearly all the incidents involved in these chapters, the very titles of which tell their own tales, are most graphically and tersely represented, so as to present the effects of a succession of photographic interiors. Nor is the chapter which he devotes to "Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley," at all inferior in point of interest; and we must claim for Mr. Dixon the credit of having been the first to prove that Cranmer, during his imprisonment here, was lodged in the Gatehouse, which then was known as the Garden Tower, but now as the Bloody Tower. The cold and the misery of that place of confinement broke Cranmer's spirit, no doubt; so that, to use Mr. Dixon's words, "the priest who at Lambeth had been little less than a hero, became, when removed to Oxford, little better than a craven.”

Sir Walter Raleigh is the last occupant of the Tower to whom Mr. Dixon introduces us. He thus speaks of him:-"Though Raleigh was now lodged in the Tower, with three poor servants, living on 57. a week for food and fire, the men in office considered him far too strong. His fame was rising, instead of falling. Great ladies from the court cast wistful glances at his room. Men from the streets and ships came crowding to the wharf whence at Westminster. they could see him walking on the wall. Raleigh was

Axe carried

before Peers going to Trial

a sight to see, not only for his fame and name, but for his picturesque and dazzling figure. Fifty-one years old; tall, tawny, splendid; with the bronze of tropical suns on his leonine cheek, a bushy beard, a round moustache, and a ripple of curly hair, which his man Peter took an hour to dress. Appareled as became such a figure in scarf and band of the richest colour and costliest stuff, in cap and plume worth a ransom, in jacket powdered with gems; his whole attire, from cap

to shoe-strings, blazing with rubies, emeralds, and pearls; he was allowed to be one of the handsomest men alive. The council got alarmed at the crowds who came down to see him. Harvey was thought too careless; and a strict gaoler was appointed to abridge the very few liberties which Raleigh then enjoyed."

It is quite possible that Mr. Dixon may be contemplating another

volume, which shall treat of those State prisoners who during the last three centuries have made the walls of the Tower famousthe noble sinners against the tyranny of the House of Stuart, and the scarcely less noble adherents of the Stuart cause in its decline and fall-those Jacobite lords and Highland soldiers, who having drawn their swords in the cause of Prince Jamie or Bonny Prince Charlie, here met their fate like Christians and brave men, and shed their blood on Tower Hill-the Derwentwaters, the Balmerinos, and the Lovats. Mr. Dixon's book has no illustrations,

except a very admirable ground-plan of the Tower as it stood in the reign of Elizabeth; but his style is so vivid and picturesque, that we scarcely feel the need of the illustrator's art. Take, for instance, his account of the vaults under the White Tower. "The vaults lie underground, with no stairs and doors of their own. Some piercings

in the shell let in a little air and still less light. These vaults were the old dungeons of the keep-the home of pirates, rebels, and persecuted Jews. One of these rooms, the cross chamber, is darkerand damper than the other two. It was called Little Ease, and is, in fact, a crypt beneath a crypt. When the Tower was full of prisoners, these vaults were used as prison lodgings, even in the Tudor and Stuart times. A few inscriptions can still be traced in the stone; one of which is that of Fisher, a Jesuit Father who was concerned in the Powder Plot. There is some ground for believing that Little Ease was the lodging of Guy Fawkes. On the north-east

vault a door opens into a secret hole, built for some purpose in the dividing wall-a cell in which there is neither breath of air nor ray of light. By a rule of the Tower which assigns every mysterious room to Raleigh, this vault is called Walter Raleigh's cell."

Again, we are not aware that any writer before Mr. Dixon has drawn attention to the wit of Bishop Fisher. If so, we may be pardoned for quoting the following anecdote from his pages: "Cardinal Fisher, eighty years old, was seized as a plotter, tried for his offence, thrust into a barge, and pulled down the Thames. When his boat slipped under the archway of the Water-gate, he toddled on shore, and turning to the crowd of guards and oarsmen about him, said, 'As you have left me nothing else to give you, I bestow on you my hearty thanks.' Some of the rough fellows smiled, though they must have felt that hearty thanks from a good old man who was about to die could do them no harm. Lodged in the strong room, he suffered much from chill and damp. The belfry not only stood above the ditch, but lay open to the east wind and to the river fog. Fisher told Cromwell, in piteous letters, that he was left without clothing to keep his body warm. Yet the fine old prelate never lost either his stoutness of heart or his quick sense of humour. One day, when it was bruited about the Tower that he was to suffer death, his cook brought up no dinner to the strong room. How is this?' asked the prelate, when he saw the man.-'Sir,' said the cook, 'it was commonly talked of in the town that you should die, and therefore I thought it vain to dress anything for you.'—'Well,' said the bishop, for all that report thou seest me still alive; therefore, whatever news thou shalt hear of me, make ready my dinner, and if thou see me dead when thou comest, eat it thyself.""

If we pass from Mr. Dixon's picturesque sketches with regret, we are compensated for that feeling by other attractions in the work on the same subject by Lord de Ros. This is profusely illustrated with ground plans and other wood engravings, some of which, by the kind permission of the author and the publisher, we have had the privilege of transferring to our pages. Lord de Ros is a field officer in the army; and he writes on the Tower of London, as might be expected, from the stand point of a soldier rather than of a man of letters like Mr. Dixon. In his own way he is equally good; but the two books are essentially different in plan and execution, and they will admirably serve to supply the deficiencies of each other. The ground plan of the Tower, as it now stands, our readers will be glad to have given them here, as a key to the description of the locality.

Lord de Ros devotes a chapter of his book to the murder of the