But in the Tower you have nothing that is soft, nothing that is pleasant, nothing one would like to have about him.
The Tower is a good thing for a world to see, so that it can know what to avoid.
Two teachers of elocution were in great rivalry. One gave an exhibition with his pupils.
“Where are your classes to-day?” asked a friend of the other one.
“Gone to Mr. Blank’s exhibition.”
“Do you permit your pupils to attend your rival’s exhibition?”
“Certainly. I want them to learn what to avoid.”
No light ever penetrates its gloomy walls. There are but two colors—the blackened wood painted by time, and the cold gray of the stones. All the color indicates cruelty—the very stones typify the character of the men who put them together, and their successors who used them. It is the cruelest appearing place on the face of the earth, now that the French Bastile is gone, and I doubt if a Frenchman could possibly construct a place so grimly severe, so unutterably merciless as the Tower. He would have had some fancy about it—it would have been lighted up somehow.
The Tower is so severe that a picture of a beheading, or of a torture, would be cheerful by contrast and improve it.
I would suggest now, that to enliven the old place a bit, and save a man from giving way too much to the depression that governs the spot, that a fresco be painted representing the burning of John Rogers at the stake, or the disemboweling of the Waldenses, or some cheerful historical picture of that kind. Should the artist select pictures from Fox’s Book of Martyrs, that one where the soldiers are crowding people off a precipice so that they fall upon iron spikes about four feet long, would impart a cheerful tone to the surroundings in the Tower and make one feel more kindly toward his race.