twenty feet high, it still
seems what in fact it was, almost impregnable by any arms but those of
the modern world. Its great weakness lay always in the matter of
provision, but it was perfectly supplied with water, by means of a well
sixty feet under ground, in which stood always ten feet of water. From
this well a stone pipe or tunnel, two feet nine inches in diameter, led
up to the very roof, access to it being given on each of the four
floors into which the keep was divided within. These apartments one
and all were divided from east to west by walls five feet thick, so
that on each floor there were two chambers forty-six feet long by
about twenty feet in breadth. That this enormous keep is the work of
Gundulph and contemporary with the Tower of London, there seems to be
no reason to doubt. Of the great part it played in English history I
have already spoken. But even in ruin it impresses one as few things
left to us nowadays, when everything we make is so monstrous in
comparison with the work of our fathers, are able to do. To stand
there on the platform a hundred and twenty feet in the air and look
out over the Medway crowded with shipping, ringing, echoing with
factories on either shore, to see the great ships in the tideway and
the fog and smoke of Chatham and its dockyards down the stream, is to
receive an impression of the fragile, but tremendous, greatness of our
civilisation such as few other places in South England would be able
to give us suddenly between two heart beats.

Such a vision of feverish and yet noble energy and endeavour, wholly
material if you will, and seemingly unaware of any world or life but
this, is altogether alien from Rochester itself, where an old
fashioned leisure, an air almost Georgian lingers yet. Indeed, one
expects to meet Mr Pickwick in the High Street or at least Charles
Dickens come in from Gadshill.

The only mood that has quite passed from Rochester, and that is yet
more securely crystallised there in the Cathedral and the Castle than
any other, is that of the Middle Age. You will not find it in any of
the churches now, nor in any inn that is left to us, nor in the houses
often both interesting and charming. All day long Rochester expects
the coach and not the pilgrims; but at night, under a windy sky, if
you wander up the hill and linger about the Cathedral in the shadow of
the great Keep while the moon reels steeply up the heavens, you may
in early Spring at any rate ret