Yet we have a "view of an interior" to contemplate before facing the lower Thames. And first, as the day is fading, we seek the dimmest part. We dive into the crypt of the bell-tower, or the curfew-tower, that used to send far and wide to many a Saxon cottage the hateful warning that told of servitude. How old the base of this tower is nobody seems to know, nor how far back it has served as a prison. The oldest initials of state prisoners inscribed on its cells date to 1600. The walls are twelve feet thick, and must have begotten a pleasant feeling of perfect security in the breasts of the involuntary inhabitants. They did not know of a device contrived for the security of their jailers, which has but recently been discovered. This is a subterranean and subaqueous passage, alleged to lead under the river to Burnham Abbey, three miles off. The visitor will not be disposed to verify this statement or to stay long in the comparatively airy crypt. Damp as the British climate may be above ground, it is more so below. We emerge to the fine range of state apartments above, and submit to the rule of guide and guide-book.
St. George's Hall, the Waterloo gallery, the council-chamber and the Vandyck room are the most attractive, all of them for the historical portraits they contain, and the first, besides, for its merit as an example of a Gothic interior and its associations with the order of the Garter, the knights of which society are installed in it. The specialty of the Waterloo room is the series of portraits of the leaders, civil and military, English and continental, of the last and successful league against Napoleon. They are nearly all by Lawrence, and of course admirable in their delineation of character. In that essential of a good portrait none of the English school have excelled Lawrence. We may rely upon the truth to Nature of each of the heads before us; for air and expression accord with what history tells us of the individuals, its verdict eked out and assisted by instructive minutiæ of lineament and meaning detected, in the "off-guard" of private intercourse, by the eye of a great painter and a lifelong student of physiognomy. We glance from the rugged Blucher to the wily Metternich, and from the philosophic Humboldt to the semi-savage Platoff. The dandies George IV. and Alexander are here, but Brummel is left out. The gem of the collection is Pius VII., Lawrence's masterpiece, widely familiar by engravings. Raphael's Julius II. seems to have been in the artist's mind, but that work is not improved on, unless in so far as the critical eye of our day may delight in the more intricate tricks of chiaroscuro and effect to which Lawrence has recourse. "Brunswick's fated chieftain" will interest the votaries of Childe Harold. Could he have looked forward to 1870, he would perhaps have chosen a different side at Waterloo, as his father might at Jena, and elected to figure in oils at Versailles rather than at Windsor. Incomparably more destructive to the small German princes have been the Hohenzollerns than the Bonapartes.
We forget these nineteenth-century people in the council-chamber, wherein reign Guido, Rembrandt, Claude, and even Da Vinci. If Leonardo really executed all the canvases ascribed to him in English collections, the common impressions of his habits of painting but little, and not often finishing that, do him great injustice. Martin Luther is here, by Holbein, and the countess of Desmond, the merry old lady
Who lived to the age of twice threescore and ten,
And died of a fall from a cherry tree then,
is embalmed in the bloom of one hundred and twenty and the gloom of Rembrandt. The two dozen pictures in this room form nearly as odd an association as any like number of portraits could do. Guercino's Sibyl figures with a cottage interior by Teniers, and Lely's Prince Rupert looks down with lordly scorn on Jonah pitched into the sea by the combined efforts of the two Poussins. The link between Berghem's cows and Del Sarto's Holy Family was doubtless supplied to the minds of the hanging committee by recollections of the manger. Our thrifty Pennsylvanian, West, is assigned the vestibule. Five of his "ten-acre" pictures illustrate the wars of Edward III. and the Black Prince. The king's closet and the queen's closet are filled mostly by the Flemings. Vandyck's room finally finishes the list. It has, besides a portrait of himself and several more of the first Charles and his family in every pose, some such queer, or worse than queer, commoners as Tom Killigrew and Sir Kenelm Digby and Venetia his hopeful spouse, so dear to novelists of a certain school.
Vast sums have been expended on the renovation and improvement of the castle during the past half century. With Victoria it has been more popular as a residence than with any of her predecessors since the fourteenth century. What, however, with its greater practical proximity to London, due to railways, and what with the queen's liking for solitude since the death of her consort, the more secluded homes of Osborne and Balmoral have measurably superseded it in her affections. Five hundred miles of distance to the Dee preclude the possibility of the dumping on her, by means of excursion trains, of loyal cockneydom. She is as thoroughly protected from that inundation in the Isle of Wight, the average Londoner having a fixed horror of sea-sickness. The running down, by her private steamer, of a few more inquisitive yachts in the Solent would be a hazardous experiment, if temporarily effective in keeping home invaders at bay. Holding as her right and left bowers those two sanctuaries at the opposite ends of her island realm, she can play a strong hand in the way of personal independence, and cease to feel that hers is a monarchy limited by the rights of the masses. It is well for the country that she should be left as far as possible to consult her own comfort, ease and health at least as freely as the humblest of her subjects. The continuance of her life is certainly a political desideratum. It largely aids in maintaining a wholesome balance between conservatism and reform. So long as she lives there will be no masculine will to exaggerate the former or obstruct the latter, as notably happened under George III. and William IV. Her personal bearing is also in her favor. Her popularity, temporarily obscured a few years ago, is becoming as great as ever. It has never been weakened by any misstep in politics, and so long as that can be said will be exposed to no serious danger.