Nobody can mistake the four pepper-boxes, with the four weathercocks on them, surmounting the corners of a great square castle, a little way from the river’s edge.  That is the Tower of London.  We see it behind the masts of sailing-vessels and the chimneys of steamers, gray and misty in the distance.  Let us come nearer to it.  Four square towers, crowned by four Oriental-looking domes, not unlike the lower half of an inverted balloon:  these towers at the angles of a square building with buttressed and battlemented walls, with two ranges of round-arched windows on the side towards us.  But connected with this building are other towers, round, square, octagon, walls with embrasures, moats, loop-holes, turrets, parapets,—­looking as if the beef-eaters really meant to hold out, if a new army of Boulogne should cross over some fine morning.  We can’t stop to go in and see the lions this morning, for we have come in sight of a great dome, and we cannot take our eyes away from it.

That is St. Paul’s, the Boston State-House of London.  There is a resemblance in effect, but there is a difference in dimensions,—­to the disadvantage of the native edifice, as the reader may see in the plate prefixed to Dr. Bigelow’s “Technology.”  The dome itself looks light and airy compared to St. Peter’s or the Duomo of Florence, not only absolutely, but comparatively.  The colonnade on which it rests divides the honors with it.  It does not brood over the city, as those two others over their subject towns.  Michel Angelo’s forehead repeats itself in the dome of St. Peter’s.  Sir Christopher had doubtless a less ample frontal development; indeed, the towers he added to Westminster Abbey would almost lead us to doubt if he had not a vacancy somewhere in his brain.  But the dome of the London “State-House” is very graceful,—­so light that it looks as if Its lineage had been crossed by a spire.  Wait until we have gilded the dome of our Boston St. Paul’s before drawing any comparisons.

We have seen the outside of London.  What do we care for the Crescent, and the Horseguards, and Nelson’s Monument, and the statue of Achilles, and the new Houses of Parliament?  The Abbey, the Tower, the Bridge, Temple Bar, the Monument, St. Paul’s:  these make up the great features of the London we dream about.  Let us go into the Abbey for a few moments.  The “dim religious light” is pretty good, after all.  We can read every letter on that mural tablet to the memory of “the most illustrious and most benevolent John Paul Howard, Earl of Stafford,” “a Lover of his Country, A Relation to Relations” (what a eulogy and satire in that expression!) and in many ways virtuous and honorable, as “The Countess Dowager, in Testimony of her great Affection and Respect to her Lord’s Memory,” has commemorated on his monument.  We can see all the folds of the Duchess of Suffolk’s dress, and the meshes of the net that confines her hair, as she lies in marble effigy on her sculptured sarcophagus.  It looks old to