A little back from Water-street, between it and St. Nicholas’s Church, stood an ancient Tower in those days. It was one of the remaining antiquities of Liverpool. It had originally belonged to the Lathoms of Lathom, and subsequently passed, by the marriage of the heiress of that family, into the hands of the Stanleys, some generations before the elevation of that illustrious house to the Derby title. At a later period it had become an assembly-room, and, last of all, by one of those strange vicissitudes to which all earthly things are liable, was a prison for debtors. But at the time we speak of there it was, as if frowning in gloomy strength upon the encroachments which modern improvements and the spirit of enterprise were making on every side of it, a grim old giant, the type, and symbol, and representative of other times. As we contemplated its massive walls or walked under its shadow, what reflections it was calculated to awaken within us. We were then too young for our mind to dwell very seriously or very long upon such topics, but we have often since thought within ourselves that, if stone walls had ears, and eyes, and tongues, what strange histories that old Tower could have told. It carried us back to what we call an age of romance, but what, in fact, was an age of stern and iron realities. What associations and recollections did the very sight of it conjure up within us! The monument of many centuries of glory and crime! In its day, although now merely an object of curiosity and a prison for debtors, the palace and fortress of nobles! In its day, perhaps, like other old castles within the land, the living grave, and the grave, when dead, of the guilty and innocent alike, of the ambitious and the victims of ambition, of heroes and saints, of martyrs and traitors, of princes and impostors, of patriots and conspirators! How often has the mailed chivalry of the middle ages rode forth through these gates in all its magnificence, pomp, and pride! How often has chained innocence been dragged through them to its dungeon’s depths, and to the shambles to which, perchance, they were the passage, feeling, as they turned upon their grating hinges and shut it from the world for ever, all the tremendous force of the “Hope no more!” which the Italian poet wrote over the entrance to his Infernal Regions! If, we repeat, its walls had tongues, what wonders could they tell, what secrets reveal, what mysteries unravel! What mighty or memorable names have resided, or been imprisoned and perished here! What strange things have been enacted within these gray old stones now crumbling into ruin, while the wronged and the wrongdoers have together passed to judgment! But the period for indulging such contemplations has long since passed away. The spirit of feudalism, after holding its ground for so many centuries, at last yielded to the genius of commerce, and the gloomy old Tower was sacrificed upon the altars of modern improvement.