ENTRANCE TO THE SMALL ARMOURY—CAMPERDOWN ANCHOR, WATERLOO GUNS, &C.
Order has at length succeeded to the Confusion, and orders on a large scale have followed the Fusion. The Armoury will be rebuilt and refurnished. The edifice, it is to be hoped, will be more in harmony with the antique character of the surrounding scene, and the new arms not less susceptible of beautiful arrangement for being better adapted to practical uses than the old. Thus far the nation will gain by its misfortune; nor will the loss, even in a pecuniary sense, be equal to a fourth of the first estimate. Every evil has been exaggerated—except the danger. That scarcely admitted of exaggeration.
Our fellow antiquaries, and not less (though for other reasons) our country-cousins everywhere, will join with us, not in lamenting the Loss, but in rejoicing at the Escape. The plan which heads this article, will enable them to understand it. Of the antiquities of the Tower, little or nothing has suffered. All that has stood for centuries, in fact, still stands there. That of which the memory is imperishable has not perished. The buildings which are destroyed, are—the Armoury, which was modern; the upper part of the Bowyer or Clarence Tower, which was also modern. The antique remains are figured on the preceding page. This tower was three stories high. The large square window below, next the ladder, is that of the chamber in which Clarence is supposed to have been murdered. In the apartment immediately over this the fire commenced. Above the belt, in the centre, all was modern. It will be seen by the Plan that this tower is exactly in the centre of the Small Armoury, at the back. The Brick Tower is of considerable antiquity, and the interior of this has been wofully damaged, so that the apartment in which the gentle Lady Jane Grey was confined, wears now a more forlorn and ruinous aspect than the slow hand of Time would have invested it with in additional centuries. Still, even here, what is gone is but the wood-work, the outward coating, the modern accessories or accumulations of the scene; the Destroyer has neither eaten through the old walls, nor undermined the deep and enduring foundations of any portion of the Old Fortress.
As for the Trophies that are gone, they are things which this nation, more perhaps than any other, can afford to surrender without a sigh. If "Britannia needs no bulwarks, no towers along her steep," neither does she need tokens of her triumphant march over the mountain-wave in days gone by. Besides, as schoolboys say of birds'-eggs taken prisoners, or apples captured in orchards, "there's plenty more where these came from." It would have been something, to be sure, to have saved from the Consumer a thing so simple as the old wheel of the "Victory;" because it was no part of the vulgar spoil of war, no commonplace implement of devastation wrested from an enemy, but a precious relic associated with the dying-hour of England's favourite hero, and a symbol, in its very form, of the eternity of his fame. It is gone; but the list of losses is not half so long as fear made it; and among the trophies yet remaining, are numbers as indestructible as the great anchor taken at Camperdown, which, the day after the fire, was seen rearing its giant bulk amidst the multitude of bristling points, and masses of fused metal.
LADY JANE GREY'S ROOM IN THE BRICK TOWER.
THE BLAZING ARMOURY—THE RAMPARTS—A CONTRAST.