sweetly as in the cottage gardens deep down in the quietude of the shires; that jailors and warders had not invariably hearts of stone; that prisoners by taking thought and snatching an instant opportunity had found a way through the walls, then to a boat on the river, and so to liberty. In describing the shifts and hopes and disappointments that at last reached their close in so happy a “curtain,” we would wish our dramatist had been moved to write another _All’s Well That Ends Well_, with a Tower background. When we discover Prince Henry, Poins, and old Sir John at their “deep drinking” at the Boar’s Head Tavern, we feel we have the Eastcheap of the early fifteenth century re-created for us, and [Illustration: THE BYWARD AND BELL TOWERS, WITH THE KING’S HOUSE ON THE RIGHT, LOOKING FROM THE TRAITOR’S GATE] that is because Shakespeare is allowing his fancy free play and is not bound down to the repetition of mere historical facts. So would we have gained had he dealt thus with the Tower and laid a stage-romance there, as well as the portions of the strictly historical plays we have already referred to. The history of the Tower, as the history of other places, will give us names of famous men and the numbering of years in plenty, but of the inner everyday life of some early century there--nothing. It is only the skilful in stagecraft and romance that dare touch the Tower to turn its records to such uses; men of less skill fail, and give us novels and plays that make weary reading and weary sitting-out. Many a tale has been penned of the times of the Papist prosecution, for instance, into which the people of the Tower have been brought, but so feeble has the grasp of the subject been that we turn to actual history for the “real romance” and exclaim, with greater conviction than ever, that fact is more wonderful than fiction. It has been said that “the distinctive charm of the historical novel is that it seems to combine fact and fiction in a way that tickles the intellectual palate. In conversation we are interested in a story if some one we know is an actor in it. Historical fiction has a like piquancy because it mingles men and women known to tradition and history with fictitious heroes and heroines and minor characters. Then life is large and important; we learn what it is to be of some service to the State; we feel the fascination of great causes and great leaders, the reviving influence of the liberty of wide spaces in time and distance. There we breathe an ampler ether, a diviner air,” and in spite of Sir Leslie Stephen, who characterises the historical romance as “pure cram or else pure fiction,” we prefer to have our history made living for us by the touch of a Shakespeare or a Scott.