The red-liveried yeomen, in the costume of the guards of Edward VI., receive you as you enter the gate beneath its old portcullis, and these are themselves no poor auxiliaries to your efforts at reproducing the past. One of them (they are popularly known as _beef-eaters_) conducts you to the Armory and Jewel-room forthwith, it being taken for granted that you have come to see these things particularly. Imagine yourself, then, passing through an immense outer-wall, in the circuit of which are set, like sentinels, the several inferior citadels, known as the Bloody Tower, the Beauchamp Tower, and the like. You gain the open court, or area, and in the centre rises the immense quadrangular and turreted mass, which overhangs this part of London: it is the Keep, or White Tower, called also Cæsar’s, though built by William the Norman. You pass the Bloody Tower, in which the young princes were smothered by the hunch-back Richard, and are shown into the Armory. Here you see, amid all sorts of bristling weapons, the sovereigns of England, from Edward I. to James II., all on horseback, and most of them in the armour of their times. The growth and decline of knightly harness is thus exhibited entire, from the “twisted mail” of Edward’s hauberk, down to the merely ornamental breast-plate of the recreant Stuart. What a procession! Some of the visors are down, and others are lifted—but to an imaginative eye, every figure appears instinct with vitality. Their very steeds, in their plated steel and ancient housings, seem clothed with thunder. Elizabeth, of course, retains her own fantastic costume, but there she sits before you, in spite of her peacock display, a glorious memorial of Tilbury, and you can fancy her prancing before her troops, and inspiring them to repel the “foul scorn” of the Armada. That very suit of armour, now stuffed with the resemblance of her father, was once worn by bluff old Hal himself; and further on, is the beautiful array of steel, in which the goodly limbs of the Royal Martyr were once actually encased. Nor are the heroes of this august Valhalla without other trophies of their times and achievements. Here are bills, pikes and partizans, Lochaber-axes and glaives, broadswords and stilettoes; and then all manner of fire-arms, from the earliest and heaviest matchlock down through all the grades of muskets, to musketoons, pistols, and pistolets. And then there are saw-shot, and bar-shot, and spike-shot, and star-shot; and then culverins and petards; and weapons offensive and defensive of all sorts and kinds. And they bear marks of having been well used in their day. Here the wars of the Roses have battered a helmet and pierced a shield: through that hole in the corslet, once spouted the rich blood of a hero at Tewksbury: that visor was rusted by the last sigh of another such as Marmion, on Flodden-field. Even this bludgeon of a staff, with pistols at the handle, has dealt midnight blows in the hands of the British Blue-beard,