Half-a-mile below London Bridge, on ground which was once a bluff, commanding the Thames from St. Saviour’s Creek to St. Olave’s Wharf, stands the Tower; a mass of ramparts, walls, and gates, the most ancient and most poetic pile in Europe....  The Tower has an attraction for us akin to that of the house in which we were born, the school in which we were trained.  Go where we may, that grim old edifice on the Pool goes with us; a part of all we know, and of all we are.  Put seas between us and the Thames, this Tower will cling to us, like a thing of life.  It colors Shakespeare’s page.  It casts a momentary gloom over Bacon’s story.  Many of our books were written in its vaults; the Duke of Orleans’s “Poesies,” Raleigh’s “Historie of the World,” Eliot’s “Monarchy of Man,” and Penn’s “No Cross, No Crown.”

Even as to length of days, the Tower has no rival among places and prisons, its origin, like that of the Iliad, that of the Sphinx, that of the Newton Stone, being lost in the nebulous ages, long before our definite history took shape.  Old writers date it from the days of Caesar; a legend taken up by Shakespeare and the poets in favor of which the name of Caesar’s tower remains in popular use to this very day.  A Roman wall can even yet be traced near some parts of the ditch.  The Tower is mentioned in the Saxon Chronicle in a way not incompatible with the fact of a Saxon stronghold having stood upon this spot.  The buildings as we have them now in block and plan were commenced by William the Conqueror; and the series of apartments in Caesar’s tower—­hall, gallery, council-chamber, chapel—­were built in the early Norman reigns, and used as a royal residence by all our Norman kings.  What can Europe show to compare against such a tale?

Set against the Tower of London—­with its 800 years of historic life, its 1,900 prisons of traditional fame—­all other palaces and prisons appear like things of an hour.  The oldest bit of palace in Europe, that of the west front of the Burg in Vienna, is of the time of Henry the Third.  The Kremlin in Moscow, the Doge’s Palazzo in Venice, are of the fourteenth century.  The Seraglio in Stamboul was built by Mohammed the Second.  The oldest part of the Vatican was commenced by Borgia, whose name it bears.  The old Louvre was commenced in the reign of Henry the Eighth; the Tuilleries in that of Elizabeth.  In the time of our civil war Versailles was yet a swamp.  Sans Souci and the Escurial belong to the eighteenth century.  The Serail of Jerusalem is a Turkish edifice.  The palaces of Athens, of Cairo, of Teheran, are all of modern date.

Neither can the prisons which remain in fact as well as in history and drama—­with the one exception of St. Angelo in Rome—­compare with the Tower.  The Bastile is gone; the Bargello has become a museum; the Piombi are removed from the Doge’s roof.  Vincennes, Spandau, Spilberg, Magdeburg, are all modern in comparison with a jail from which Ralph Flambard escaped so long ago in the year 1100, the date of the First Crusade.