TOWER OF LONDON.
It seems a long, long time ago, that bleak Christmas day of the year 800, when the Pope of Rome placed the Iron Crown of Lombardy upon the annointed head of Charlemagne under the dome of St. Peter's, amid the huzzas of the multitude of Frankish warriors and barons who witnessed the sacred ceremony, and yet far back in that nearly barbarous age, the chroniclers tell us in their scholastic volumes of the monasteries, that a Tower existed in London and on the same spot where now the wardens patrol in their red tunics and explain historical conundrums to dull Cockneys.
And some of the chroniclers go farther back and profess to believe that the Tower is as old as the Roman occupation of Britain, and do not hesitate to say that Julius Cæsar, who has been accused of so many good and bad deeds, was the founder of the old forbidding pile of masonry.
Be that as it may, it is old enough to have earned a lasting infamy, only once deserved in history by another grim fortress,—its twin brother and accomplice in blood and oppression, the Bastile Of Paris. That foul excresence on the fair face of the Earth has been swept away by the stormy sea of a people's vengeance, while the Tower of London still remains as a lesson of tradition, to tell of the crimes that God has permitted kings and dwellers in high places to perpetrate against the people, who have suffered and died and made no sign.
The charge to see the Tower of London is only sixpence in these days, and for a sixpence a visitor may see everything; dungeon and trap door, axe and scaffold, crown jewels and prison bars, the cages and the dungeons and graves of those who suffered and died here during the long night of centuries,—and all this for a paltry sixpence.
Amid the tramp and thunder of a hundred battles it has stood unshaken; it is too strong for the destroying hand of man; and time, as if in reverence, has trod lightly as he has stepped over its massive walls.
I saw its towers; four of them, standing up against the sky, bellshaped and surmounted by weather vanes, one day from London Bridge, and having a curiosity to see a structure, which even more than Westminster Abbey is coeval with authentic history, I walked slowly to Tower Hill, passed along the firm drawbridge, paid a sixpence and entering under the spiked portcullis, I found myself in the Lion Tower which stands at the corner of the moat or Tower ditch facing the Thames.