indeed our Roman and British antiquities about which he busied himself; the more distinct vestiges of more recent periods did not suit his turn for ingenious conjecture and fanciful speculation; he did not relish being controlled and checked in his inferences and elucidations by too many or too obdurate facts. The dimmer the traces of the perished past, the more Stukely could always make of them. Yet the learning of the modern Arch-Druid, as he used to be called in his own day, was very considerable, though it hardly sufficed for ballast to his imagination when in full sail, and there is curious and valuable matter in all his works. As a man too he appears to have had all the quiet virtues and gentle dispositions becoming an antiquarian-one living in the half-visionary world of the past, and withdrawn by his favourite studies from much of the irritation and turmoil of present interests in which most other men spend their days. His death was very characteristic and very beautiful, as it is told in a short sketch of his history by his friend Mr. Collinson. His usual residence in the last years of his life was in Queen Square, London, beside the church of St. George the Martyr, of which he was rector; and he had also a country house at Kentish Town to which he frequently retired-traversing on the way part of the ground which Cæsar and his Roman legions, as he imagined, had trodden eighteen hundred years before, and on which the encampments they had raised were still to his "undoubting mind" as visible almost as if the supposed mounds and circumvallations had been thrown up only the preceding summer. Returning from thence," says his biographer, "on Wednesday the 27th of February, 1765, to his house in Queen Square, according to his usual custom, he lay down on his couch, where his housekeeper came and read to him; but, some occasion calling her away, on her return he with a cheerful look said, Sally, an accident has happened since you have been absent.' Pray,

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what is that, Sir?' 'No less than a stroke of the palsy.' She replied, 'I hope not, Sir;' and began to weep. Nay, do not trouble yourself,' said he, but get some help to carry me up stairs, for I never shall come down again but on men's shoulders.' Soon after his faculties failed him, but he continued quiet and composed, as in a sleep, until Sunday following, the 3rd of March, 1765,

and then departed, in his seventy-eighth year, which he attained by his remarkable temperance and regularity. By his particular directions he was conveyed in a private manner to East Ham in Essex, and was buried in the churchyard, ordering the turf to be laid smoothly over him, without any monument. This spot he particularly fixed on in a visit he paid some time before to the clergyman of that parish, when walking with him one day in the churchyard."

THE earliest description of the Tower, that of Fitz-Stephen, who died in 1191, has something striking amidst its brevity. "It (London) hath on the east part a Tower Palatine, very large and very strong, whose court and walls rise up from a deep foundation. The mortar is tempered with the blood of beasts." A strange unmanageable thing is the imagination! There is no real connexion between the fabulous blood-tempered mortar of the old monkish writer and the subsequent history of the Tower of London. Yet, when we think of that history, how appropriate does it seem that the very foundations of those walls should be laid in blood! Fitz-Stephen was nearer than we are to the period when these foundations were laid, by almost seven centuries; and yet he tells us not who laid them. Tradition says, Julius Cæsar; and Poetry is the step-nurse of the children of Tradition :

"Ye towers of Julius, London's lasting shame."

Why does the poet himself tell us, in a note upon his well-known line, that the oldest part of the Tower is vulgarly attributed to Julius Cæsar? He had authority enough for his apostrophe to the towers of Julius, even if the belief of the vulgar were not a sufficient basis. Stow tells us, "It hath been the common

VOL. II.

opinion, and some have written (but of none assured ground), that Julius Cæsar, the first conqueror of the Britons, was the original author as well thereof, as also of many other towers, castles, and great buildings within this realm." How does the good, painstaking antiquary disprove the common opinion? how does he show that the old writers who adopted the common opinion had "none assured ground?" "Cæsar remained not here so long, nor had he in his head any such matter; but only to despatch a conquest of this barbarous country, and to proceed to greater matters. Neither did the Roman writers make mention of any such buildings erected by him here." He knows what was in Julius Cæsar's head, and he knows what is not in the Roman writers, but he knows no more. And then come other antiquaries, who would give us something not quite so far off as Julius Cæsar to rest our faith upon. Dr. Stukeley would have a citadel raised here, about the time of Constantine the Great; and Dr. Miller proves that the Tower of London was the capital fortress of the Romans, their treasury, and their mint, from the circumstance that three coins of the Emperors Honorius and Arcadius were found within the Tower walls, in digging for the foundations of some modern building. When we talk of the beginnings of such a place as the Tower of London, we rejoice in these gropings and mystifications of the learned; for, unmolested by their facts, we desire to look into the depths of a fathomless antiquity. It is little to us that Stow the modern tells us, as if settling the matter, "I find in a fair register-book of the acts of the Bishops of Rochester, set down by Edmund of Hadenham, that William I., surnamed Conqueror, builded the Tower of London, to wit, the great white and square tower there, about the year of Christ 1078, appointing Gundulph, then Bishop of Rochester, to be principal surveyor and overseer of that work, who was for that time lodged in the house of Edmere, a burgess of London." But mark how the modern antiquary is presently lost in the dim morning of history; and how even he falls back upon tradition :—“ Ye have heard before, that the wall of this city was all round about furnished with towers and bulwarks, in due distance every one from other; and also that the River of Thames, with its ebbing and flowing, on the south side had subverted the said wall and towers there. Wherefore, it is supposed, King William, for defence of this city, in place most dangerous and open to the enemy, having taken down the second bulwark in the east part of the wall from the Thames, builded this tower, which was the great square tower (now called the White Tower), and hath been since at divers times enlarged with other buildings adjoining, as shall be showed hereafter." Fitz-Stephen is Stow's authority for the fact of the Thames washing away the south wall; all the rest is conjecture. But since Stow's time-that is in 1720, and again in 1777-foundations of buildings long swept away were discovered near the White Tower. They were of stone, of the great width of three yards, and so strongly cemented that they were with difficulty removed. Who built these walls which correspond so remarkably with Fitz-Stephen's description? How are we sure that the White Tower was the building of which Gundulph was the architect? Can we be certain that the White Tower was the Arx Palatina described by Fitz-Stephen? These are questions which the antiquaries will not solve for us, even while they command us to believe in no vulgar traditions. Let them remain unsolved. We have got our foot upon tolerably firm ground. We see the busy Bishop (it

was he who built the great keep at Rochester) coming daily from his lodgings at the honest burgess's to erect something stronger and mightier than the fortresses of the Saxons. What he found in ruins, and what he made ruinous, who can tell? There might have been walls and bulwarks thrown down by the ebbing and flowing of the tide. There might have been, dilapidated or entire, some citadel more ancient than the defences of the people whom the Norman conquered, belonging to the age when the great lords of the world left everywhere some marks upon the earth's surface of their pride and their power. That Gundulph did not create the fortress is tolerably clear. What he built, and what he destroyed, must still, to a certain extent, be a matter of conjecture.

Here then, about the middle of the eleventh century, was a Bishop of Rochester, with that practical mastery of science and art which so honourably distinguishes the ecclesiastics of that age, building some great work at the command of the King. The register referred to by Stow speaks of it as the Great Tower. But the chroniclers tell us that in the year 1090 the Tower of London was "sore shaken by the wind." There was a mighty tempest in that year, which they inform us blew down more than five hundred houses in London. These were houses of wood and mud,-huts not built to brave the elements. But the great White Tower to be sore shaken by the wind! The wind might as well attempt to shake Snowdon or Ben Nevis. This single fact is to us a pretty satisfactory proof that the Tower, in the reign of Rufus, was a collection of buildings of various dates, and of various degrees of strength. Rufus, it is said, repaired the damage, and he added to the erections by a mode which marked his progress very distinctly. Henry of Huntingdon says, "He pilled and shaved the people with tribute, especially to spend about the Tower of London and the great hall at Westminster." Stow, describing the additional buildings of Rufus and his successor Henry I., says, "They also caused a castle to be builded under the said tower, to wit, on the south side toward the Thames, and also encastelated the same round about." The castle under the Great Tower is held to be that anciently called St. Thomas's Tower, beneath which was Traitor's Gate. Here, again, the precise building erected is not very clearly defined. That the Tower gradually assumed the character of a regular fortress, by successive additions, there can be little doubt. At the period of which we are speaking its limits were not very exactly defined; and its liberties or juridical extent continued to be a matter of controversy for several centuries. The chroniclers tell us that the four first constables of the Tower of London after the Conquest made a vineyard of the site now known as East Smithfield, which they held by force from the Priory of the Holy Trinity, within Aldgate, to which it pertained. It was restored to the Church in the second year of King Stephen. In the reign of that monarch, during his contest with the Empress Maud, Geoffrey de Mandeville was authorized by the Empress to hold to his own use "the Tower of London, with the castle under it." This certainly gives the notion of a principal building such as the White Tower, with one of an inferior character. It cannot be exactly determined whether, previous to the reign of Stephen, the Tower was capacious enough for a royal residence; but as early as the reign of Henry I. it had been employed (as probably all places of strength were then occasionally employed) as a prison for state offenders. In the first year of that king Ralph Flambard, the