"This strange eventful history." The chapel of St. Peter's ad Vincula stands at the north-west corner of the Tower, and must formerly have been very beautiful, though now sadly disfigured by modern innovators, who are cursed with such a taste as ought to be left only to its free indulgence in the walls of Bethlehem or St. Luke's. Here were interred the headless bodies of Queen Catherine Howard, Anne Boleyn, Margaret Countess of Shrewsbury, Lady Jane Grey: beauty, virtue, and talent, each bared her fair neck--the blow was struck, and now, "After life's fitful fever, they sleep well." Here also repose Sir Thomas More, Cromwell, Earl of Essex, Seymour the Lord Admiral, and (strange retribution) his brother, the Protector Somerset; Dudley, the husband of Lady Jane Grey; Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex--all beheaded. The catalogue may be dismissed in the words of Shakspeare, where he "Tells sad stories of the death of kings: How some have been deposed; some slain in war; Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed; Some poison'd by their wives, some sleeping kill'd: _All murdered!_" Macaulay, in his _History of England_, speaking of this chapel, says: "There is no sadder spot on earth than this little cemetery. Death is there associated, not, as in Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's, with genius and virtue, with public veneration, and with imperishable renown; not, as in our humblest churches and churchyards, with every thing that is most endearing in social and domestic charities, but with whatever is darkest in human nature and in human destiny, with the savage triumph of implacable enemies, with the inconstancy, the ingratitude, the cowardice of friends, with all the miseries of fallen greatness and of blighted fame." We conclude with the following extract from the _Illustrated London News_ of January 1843: "The extent of the Tower within the walls is twelve acres and five roods. The exterior circuit of the ditch--now a garden--surrounding it is 3156 feet. On the river-side is a broad and handsome wharf, or gravelled terrace, separated by the ditch from the fortress, and mounted with sixty pieces of ordnance, which are fired on the royal birthdays, or in celebration of any remarkable event. From the wharf into the Tower is an entrance by a drawbridge. Near it is a cut connecting the river with the ditch, having a water-gate, called Traitors' Gate, state prisoners having been formerly conveyed by this passage from the Tower to Westminster for trial. Over Traitors' Gate is a building containing the water-works that supply the interior with water.