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.

[Illustration:  LOCK AT WINDSOR.]

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 minutiae 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.