The spirit of the twentieth century is alien from the spirit still brooding over the Tower, and which has not been quite dispelled by latter-day encroachments. Yet, when we find the great dungeon under the White Tower wired for electric light, we begin to wonder what the end will be. May we not hope that wiser counsels will prevail and that we shall have the Tower restored--in the better sense of the term--to something of its appearance in Elizabethan and Jacobean times? How refreshing it would be to leave the traffic of Great Tower Street behind and pass into the tranquillity of Shakespeare’s day, as we entered the Tower gateway. The modern policeman should no longer repeat the irritating cry, “Get your tickets! Get your tickets!” at the foot of Tower Hill; the wretched refreshment shed, which all visitors are compelled to pass through, should no longer assail us on our entry with its close atmosphere savouring of stale buns. Even on “free days” this “ticket” procedure has to be gone through solemnly, and the turnstiles to be pushed round to satisfy some mystic regulation. It is all very suggestive of a circus, and reminds us that, as a nation, we are singularly lacking in the sense of humour. The stage-lighting effects in connection with the Crown Jewels in the Wakefield Tower certainly charm the glitter-loving multitude, but this dazzling cageful of royal gold plate stands, we are apt to forget, in a room where Henry VI. had an oratory, and where, tradition tells, he was “murdered in cold blood as he knelt before the altar that stood in the recess of the south-east corner” of the chamber. Here was committed “one of the most barbarous murders that even the Tower has recorded in its blood-stained annals,” as one authority has it; but who to-day has leisure to think of this when told to “move on,” as one of the crowd surging round the regalia cage, by yet another policeman who might have just come in from the duties of regulating motor omnibuses in the Strand?