Dover Castle, that “great fortress, reverend and worshipful,” sits regally on the lofty cliffs and looks (what it has several times proved not to be) impregnable. It occupies a site of thirty-five acres within its ceinture of curtain-walls, studded at intervals with twenty-six defensible towers, of every size and shape. The chief entrance to the Castle precincts is by the great “Constable’s Tower,” also variously styled Fiennes, or Newgate Tower, to distinguish it from the Old Tower, formerly the principal entrance. The others have, for the most part, names sounding as strangely as those of Arthurian romance: Abrancis, or Rokesley Tower; Colton’s; Arthur’s, or North Gate; Armourer’s; Well Tower; Harcourt’s; Chilham, or Culderscot; Hurst; Arsic, or Sayes Tower; Gatton; Peveril’s Gate, also called Beauchamp, or Marshal’s Tower; Porth’s, Gasting’s, or Mary’s Tower; Clopton’s; God’s-foe; Crevecœur’s, Craville’s, or the Earl of Norfolk’s Tower; Fitzwilliam or St. John’s; Avranches, or Maunsel’s; Veville, or Pincester; Ashfordian Tower; Mamimot, or Mainmouth Tower; Palace, or Subterranean Gate; Suffolk Tower; and the Arsenal Tower. Besides this imposing array there were, and there remain still, profoundly deep ditches outside the walls. In midst of all these outworks, rising bold and massive as the great keep of the Tower of London itself, is the Palace Tower, or Keep. This is not the actual “castellum Dofris” which Harold, under stress and durance, was made to swear on the bones of the saints that he would yield to William Duke of Normandy, “with the well of water in it,” but a later array of buildings; the Keep being Norman work of about 1153. The actual well is the one now arched over and covered up in the north angle of the Keep. The last occasion on which Dover Castle was the scene of warlike operations was when it was captured from the Royalists on August 1st, 1642. This successful enterprise was the work of a mere merchant, one Drake, and a dozen men, who at dead of night, by means of ropes and scaling-ladders, climbed the cliffs at an “inaccessible” point; as such left unguarded. Seizing the sentinel, the gates were thrown open, and the officer on duty, thinking the invading party was a much larger one, surrendered. [Illustration: THE CHURCH OF ST. MARY-IN-THE-CASTLE, WITH THE ROMAN PHAROS, DOVER.]