Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 4.djvu/619

TO 1760.] learned in all tbc arts that are necessary to an architect. At the early age of thirteen, he was an inventor of an astronomical instrument, a pneumatic machine, and an instrument of use in gnomonics. At sixteen he was extraordinarily forward in mathematics and astronomy, and at eighteen he became one of the philosophers whose association gradually grew into the Royal Society, of which institution he was an original and leading member. At this time he is said to have been the author of fifty-three new theories, inventions, experiments, and improvements of more or less value. In 1651 he was appointed to the chair of astronomy at Gresham College; three years after to that of the Savilian professor at Oxford. In 1661 he was appointed by Charles II. to assist Sir John Denham, the surveyor-general, and in 1663 was commissioned to examine the old cathedral of St. Paul, with a view to its restoration in keeping with the Corinthian colonnade which Inigo Jones had, with a strange blindness to unity, tagged on to a Gothic church. The old church was found to be so thoroughly dilapidated, that Wren recommended its entire removal and the erection of another. This created a terrible outcry amongst the clergy and the citizens, who regarded the old fabric as a model of beauty. The clamour was only ended by the whole roof of the south cross tumbling in; but it was renewed again as violently as ever on Wren once more urging the removal of the ruinous mass. Not only the clergy and citizens, but some of the commissioners were bent on preserving the old tower, and these dissensions were only interrupted by the bursting out of the great fire of London.

Whilst these contentions were going on, Wren had entered fairly on his profession of architect. He built the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford, begun in 1663, and completed in 1669; and the fine library of Trinity College, Cambridge, and the beautiful square, Neville's Court, to the same college. He also built the chapels of Pembroke and Emmanuel Colleges, in the same university. In the erection of these, he suffered, from the conceit and conflicting opinions of parties concerned, a foretaste of the squabbles and contradictions which rendered the whole period of the building of St. Paul's miserable. In 1663 he found leisure to visit Paris, and study the magnificent palaces and churches with which Louis XIV. was embellishing his capital. There he got a glimpse of the design for the Louvre, which Bernini, the architect, showed him, but only for a moment; and he was in communication with Mansard, Le Vau, and Le Pautre.

On his return, the contentions regarding pulling down old St. Paul's were rife as ever; but the following year the fire occupied, and Wren was commissioned to make a plan for the rebuilding of the city. He proposed to restore this on a regular plan, with wide streets and piazzas, and for the banks of the river to be kept open on both sides with spacious quays, like the banks of the Seine, at Paris, at the present time. But those plans were defeated by the selfishness of the inhabitants and traders, and the banks of the Thames became once more blocked up with wharves and warehouses, narrow and winding lanes once more sprung up, which are now being opened up at a vast cost; and Wren could only devote his architectural talent to the churches, the Royal Exchange, and Custom House. These latter buildings were completed in the three following years; they have since both been burnt down and rebuilt. Temple Bar, a hideous erection, was finished in the fourth year, 1670. All this time the commencement of the new St. Paul's was impeded by the attempts of the commissioners to restore the old tumbling fabric, and it was only by successive fallings-in of the ruins that they were compelled to allow Wren to remove the whole decayed mass, and clear the ground for the foundations of his cathedral. These were laid in 1675, nine years after the fire, and the building was only terminated in thirty-five years, the stone on the summit of the lantern being laid by Wren's son, Christopher, in 1710. The choir, however, had been opened for divine service in 1697, in the twenty-second year of the erection.

During this long period Sir Christopher had been busily employed in raising many other buildings; amongst these, the Royal Observatory, Greenwich; St. Bride's; St. Swithin's; the Gateway Tower, Christ Church, Oxford, St. Antholine's, Watling Street; the palace at Winchester, never completed; Ashmolean Museum, and Queen's College Chapel, Oxford; St. James's, Westminster; St. Clement's, Eastcheap; St. Martin's, Ludgate Hill; St. Andrew's, Holborn; Christ Church, Newgate Street; Hampton Court Palace, an addition; Mordon College, Blackheath; Greenwich Hospital; St. Dunstan in the East, tower and spire; Buckingham House, since pulled down; and Marlborough House.

His plan for his chef-d'œuvre, St. Paul's, like his grand plan for the City, with its principal streets ninety feet' wide, its second-rate streets sixty, and its third-rate thirty, was rejected. This cathedral was a composition compact and simple, consisting of a single general octagonal mass, surmounted by a dome, and extended on its west side by a portico, and a short nave or vestibule within. The great idea of Wren was to adapt it to protestant worship, and therefore he produced a design for the interior, the parts of which were beautifully grouped together so as to produce at once regularity and intricacy, yet without those long side aisles and recesses, which the processions and confessionals of catholic worship require. But the duke of York, afterwards James II., was already projecting the restoration of popery, and not only was the beautiful plan of Wren rejected, but the one for the present erection was altered to suit catholic purposes, to the intense chagrin of the architect, which he resisted even with tears, but resisted in vain. Escaped from royal opposition, Wren, however, only fell into that of the commissioners, every man of whom thought he knew better how to plan a national cathedral than the great architect himself. The whole long period of Wren's erection of this noble pile was one continued battle with the conceit, ignorance, and dogmatism of the commissioners, who made his life a bitter martyrdom; and when we read the admired inscription on his tomb in St. Paul's, "Si monumentum quæris, circumspice," we behold, on obeying its injunction, only what he did, not what he suffered in doing it.

The style of St. Paul's, and, indeed, of all Wren’s churches, is neither Grecian nor Gothic, but Italian, influenced by the fashion which Bernini, the Italian architect of Louis XIV., had introduced into France. It is a class of architecture of which the Grecian is the basis, but which is