Some of these strange places have equally strange names. Pickle Herring Street, and Shad Street, and other cramped thoroughfares with ancient and fish-like designations, suggest that here, also, almost directly opposite to Billingsgate, there must have been a market once. There is scarcely even a shop or a public-house now. This is the London that really works with a will. To the right are tanneries and tallow-chandleries—their odour loads the atmosphere as if it were a thick fog, incapable of any effort to rise—to the left are vast granaries and wharves; and between them the narrow spaces are filled up with hurrying vehicles and toiling men.
From the south to the north side of the river there is a continual stream of labourers, some making their way under the river, like moles, by means of the subway, some streaming down to the boat-landings and casting off in batches into the tide. The subway is an iron barrel, some six feet in diameter, which has been driven underground far below the bed of the Thames. Walking through it, one hears, as a series of dull, only half-audible, thuds, the lashing of a paddle-steamer overhead. No other sound reaches that cramped, underground chamber, in which one seems to be walking as in a coal mine, from the dark into the dark. After this dreary journey, we ascend a flight of stairs that is wearying, and that seems to be endless, and emerge on Tower Hill, into the sunshine, and the presence of green trees, and the sight of what is most venerable in the whole English realm.
Tower Hill is a sort of oasis in a desert filled with the whirling sands of traffic—the terminus to the great lines of warehouses which fill Thames Street. Surrounded by shops and offices and public buildings, it is, but for the country cousin newly arrived to behold “the sights,” almost as quiet as some retired corner of the parks. Standing here, where so many historic heads have fallen, one may behold the river streaming by, and watch the sun lighting up the polished masts of a hundred vessels slumbering in the Pool.
On Tower Hill stands Trinity House, which claims notice here because of its close connection with the river and with ships. Queen Elizabeth made the Masters of Trinity the guardians of our sea-marks, and they have now the sole management of our lighthouses and our buoys. Part of their business is to mark out the locality of wrecks, and to announce to the shipmasters of all nations any changes in the entrances to English ports. At Trinity House is one of those numerous London museums which are seldom seen—a museum of models of lifeboats, buoys, lighthouses, life-saving apparatus, and other objects connected with the safety of ships and voyagers at sea. Here the curious visitor may spend an hour or two with advantage, and it will be matter for wonder if he does not come away oddly instructed in many intricate matters connected with the sea.
To all fairly informed Englishmen, the history of the Tower of London is so familiar that it would be an impertinence to recount any portion of it here. The “towers of Julius, London’s lasting shame”—not that Cæsar really had anything to do with them—have the peculiarity of being known, through some sort of representation, to most, even, of those stay-at-home people who are said to have country wits. And let it be said at once that at the first glance they are not nearly so imposing as they are usually made to appear. “And that is the Tower?” an American observed to me lately; “and that is the Tower? Well, then, I guess the Tower was not worth crossing the Atlantic to see.” Yet, even this unfavourable critic saw reason to change his views. It is from the river, and not from Tower Hill, that the first inspection of this venerable edifice should be made. Seated on an idle barge, one may contemplate it at leisure; and it is only after leisurely contemplation that its fine grouping, its richly varied colour, and its compact massiveness force themselves on one’s slow appreciation. From just behind where we are supposed to be seated, the adherents of the Earl of Salisbury poured stone shot into the Tower precincts when Henry VI. was king. Facing us, the lower portion now hidden by a quay wall, is the round arch of Traitors’ Gate—
“Through which before
Went Essex, Raleigh, Sidney, Cranmer, More.”
with those steps still intact on which the Princess Elizabeth seated herself, petulantly declining to make such an entrance to the Tower as would declare her to be a traitor to the realm.
