It is a long, steep, and dusty climb to Dover Castle from the town. Halfway up, the visitor of forty years ago would be attracted by the tinkling of a small bell, and, looking round, his gaze would fall upon haggard creatures, gaunt and unkempt, who crouched behind iron bars and piteously adjured him to "remember the poor debtors." Poor devils! condemned by the brutality of obsolescent laws to moulder in captivity in expiation for pitiful debts. But brutal though we were until comparatively recent years, we must not believe Victor Hugo when he says that in 1820 the grim picturesqueness of the Castle Hill was enhanced by the spectacle of three malefactors' bodies, tarred and obscene, which swung in the winds of Heaven. That picturesque detail is more romantic than truthful; but the man who, like Victor Hugo, could write seriously in another place of the Firth of Forth as "_la premiere de la quatrieme_" is not to be taken for either geographer or historian. All these evidences of a brutal age are gone, and Dover Castle is remarkable nowadays chiefly for the extraordinary way in which old and new are grafted one upon another. Side by side with the Norman Keep are modern magazines and military storehouses, while the curtain walls of the wards give support to repositories of Royal Artillery shot and shell. Even the roof of the Keep is put to practical purpose by the War Department, for it has been vaulted and strengthened to carry a battery of heavy cannon. The Keep is of three floors; on the third floor are the State apartments in which Charles the First welcomed his Queen, and where, seventeen years later, he bade her a sad adieu. They are gloomy rooms, heavy with suspicion of danger, conspiracy, and intrigue, and are approached by a staircase flanked with secret guard-rooms; the walls pierced with arrow-slits, scarcely to be distinguished in the darkness of the place, even when you are bidden to look for them. It is strange to read in the struggles between Charles and the Parliament with what laxity fortresses were often held for either side. Dover Castle is a case in point. It was held for the King by a small force whose discipline and courage were so to seek that it needed but the daring of a Dover merchant and a few followers to capture it. With this exploit ends the story of the warlike doings here, and all that is left to tell relates only to Marlborough's French prisoners, who were for years cooped up within these walls pining and eating away their hearts for very love and despair of ever reaching _la belle France_, whose outlines they could dimly see from the narrow embrasures of their foreign prison.