I made the usual circuit of the castle; but with the details which every guide-book furnishes, I would not fatigue my readers. For the mere show of royal furniture, my mind could find little room; and mere State-apartments, as such, were even a distasteful sight. But the noble architecture, and unrivalled site of the castle; its histories, and the charm which association gives to every tower and window, and to the whole scene with which it fills the eye—these are the sublime elements with which Windsor inspires the soul, and impregns the imagination. _Hoc fecit Wykeham_—is the inscription one catches, deep cut in the wall of one of the towers: an _equivoque_ which the ambitious architect is said to have interpreted, as implying that _the work was the making of him_, when asked by his royal patron how he dared to claim the castle as a creation, and turn it into a memorial of himself. But who can appropriate Windsor? The humble poet, by a single song, has taken its terrace to himself; and every stone, and every timber, might bear some appropriate and speaking legend. I thought chiefly of Charles the First. How he loved this castle! How he would have adorned it, and what a home of worth and genius he would have made it, had he not fallen on evil times! That truly English heart beat warmly here, a few weeks before it ceased to beat forever; and along this esplanade was borne his bleeding body, (on which fell the symbolic snow of a passing cloud,) to its last sublime repose. “So went the white king to his rest,” says a quaint historian: and when, at Evening Prayer in St. George’s chapel, I reflected that his solemn relics were underneath, I felt a reviving affection for his memory, almost like that of personal love. The dying sunbeams gilded the carvings of the sanctuary and the banners of the knights; I sat in one of the stalls near the altar, and observed near me the motto—_cœlum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt_. When at length the anthem swelled through the gorgeous chapel—_Awake up my glory_—I could not but respond, inwardly, that it was meet that the glory of God should be thus perpetually uplifted in the palace of a Sovereign, whom he has so magnified in the earth. And to which of her Sovereigns does England owe it, that she is not now either a cracked Commonwealth, without God and without government, or else an iron despotism, in the grasp of successful usurper? He who sleeps under that chapel said that he died “a martyr for the people:” and so he did. On the principle by which Macaulay attributes the liberties of England to her Cromwells, we might attribute salvation to Judas and Pontius Pilate.