Sketches of Foreign Travel, No. 5 [pp. 504-508]

SKETCHES OF FOREIGN TRAVEL.
weary and oppressed of the earth are to come to get rich and be
happy by growing dollars where only cents grew before. These are
visions of ignorance and diseased imagination. It is useless to at tempt to combat them by argument or reason. Experience and
time, the greatest and dearest of teachers, must do that. We will
only remark in closing this short article, that unless some new system
does take the place of the one now existing, the production of the
country must greatly decrease, and that some of us may yet live to
see the day when a pound of Southern cotton will be worth its weight
in paper money, which, indeed, would be no new sight.
ART. X.-SKETCIIES OF FOREIGN TRAVEL.
No. 5.
LoNDON, OCTOBER 1ST, 1866.
DEAR zEVIEW:-Next to Westminster Abbey, the mnost interesting object in London, to your correspondent, is " The Tower."
Blot out the Tower from the records of the past, and English history
would be lamentably incomplete, for in its traditions are the materials which go largely towards making up that history.
There is an immense mass of buildings which go generally by
the name of" The Tower," but the chief feature of the pile, and that
which stands godfather to the balance, is a great square structure
about four stories high, with walls of solid stone fourteen feet thick,
and massive towers shooting up at each of its four corners. It was
built, we are informed, by William the conqu?erer, in the year 1079,
as a place of retreat in case the rebellious Saxons outdoors should
grow too contumacious and strong. It is distinctively called the
" Whlite Towter," and is now used as an arsenal, and a store-house
for every curious species of arm and armor peculiar to different
ages and countries. There may be seen every weapon of offence or
defence employed by every nation of the known world from the remotest to the present time.
On the ground floor, as we go in, are arranged about fifty horsemen, clothed in impenetrable panoply of chain armor and solid steel,
and bristling pugnaciously with the different weapons peculiar to
their several centuries. The coup d'oeil is positively startling. The
effigies of the horses are so instinct with life, and the vizored figures
astride so accurately personify the knightly images kindled in our
minds by romance, that we are lifted, tobr the moment, out of our
consciousness of the present, and transported into the life of dead
centuries. But that history is aflame with the feats of arms and
daring courage of those iron-clad riders, one would conclude they
were rather a timid set, for their chief aim was obviously to keep
from being hurt. In looking at those steel fortresses, frowning
down from their horses, the spectator is puzzled to imagine how anybody could have been killed. A " monitor" does not seem more
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