age of time, and Raleigh's few
letters from the Tower are almost all of them undated. His comfort had
its vicissitudes; he was now tormented, now indulged. A whisper from the
outer world would now give him back a gleam of hope, now a harsh answer
would complete again the darkness of his hopelessness. He was vexed with
ill-health, and yet from the age of fifty-one to that of sixty-three the
inherent vigour of his constitution, and his invincible desire to live,
were unabated. From all his pains and sorrows he took refuge, as so many
have done before him, in the one unfailing Nepenthe, the consolatory
self-forgetfulness of literature. It was in the Tower that the main bulk
of his voluminous writings were produced.

He was confined in the upper story of what was called the Garden Tower,
now the Bloody Tower, and not, as is so often said, in the White Tower,
so that the little cell with a dim arched light, the Chapel Crypt off
Queen Elizabeth's Armoury, which used to be pointed out to visitors as
the dungeon in which Raleigh wrote _The History of the World_, never, in
all probability, heard the sound of his footsteps. It is a myth that he
was confined at all in such a dungeon as this. According to Mr. Loftie,
his apartments were those immediately above the principal gate to the
Inner Ward, and had, besides a window looking westward out of the Tower,
an entrance to themselves at a higher level, the level of the
Lieutenant's and Constable's lodgings. They probably opened directly
into a garden which has since been partly built over.

Raleigh was comfortably lodged; it was Sir William Waad's complaint that
the rooms were too spacious. Lady Raleigh and her son shared them with
him for a considerable time, and Sir Walter was never without three
personal servants. He was poor, in comparison with his former opulent
estate, but he was never in want. Sherborne just sufficed for six years
to supply such needs as presented themselves to a prisoner. His personal
expenses in the Tower slightly exceeded 200_l._, or 1,000_l._ of our
money; there was left a narrow margin for Lady Raleigh. The months of
January and February 1604 were spent in trying to make the best terms
possible for his wife and son. In a letter to the Lords of the Council,
Raleigh mentions that he has lost 3,000_l._ (or 15,000_l._ in Victorian
money) a year by being deprived of his five main sources of income,
namely the Governorship of Jersey, the Patent of the Wine Off