Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 104, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 May 1911 — TOWER HILL [ARTICLE]

TOWER HILL

A Noted Leaden Spot, the Seene ms Many Femoue. Oocuri eneee. Tower Hill Is perhaps both the most Important eminence and the most notable spot in ail London. Few of us think what great persons have quietly lived there and what others, equally great, have wept and died upon it. To it, or rather to Great Tower street, came Rochester to pursue his trade as an Italian fortune teller, while the bedizened Buckingham often walked thither to consult a conjurer, a shrewd, farseeing rogue, who, when Felton bought, at the crier’s shop on the summit of the hill for a shilling the knife with which he killed the dnke’s father, may have known for what purpose it was required. William Penn was born on this hill In a bouse close to London wall. For-ty-four years later—that is, in A. D. 1085—a poet lay dead, choked by a crust which starvation had urged him to devour too greedily, in an upper room of the Bull tavern. This was the ill fated Otway. At the time when the son of the muses lay dead Betterton, the celebrated founder of the stage after the restoration, was wringing tears from the eyes of the public, not for the famished dead, but at his own fictitious sorrows in “Venice Preserved.’’ It was in Great Tower street that Peter the Great used to pass his evenings drinking hot pepper and brandy with bis boon companion. Lord Carmarthen.—London Standard.