Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 4.djvu/620

606 so freely innovated upon, as to leave little general resemblance. This we must seek in the parts where we have columns and pilasters of every Grecian and, indeed, Roman order, pediments, peristyles, architraves, and friezes, mingled up with windows of all kinds, and all kinds of recesses and projections, the facades and intercolumniations ornamented with festoons, and wreaths, and human masks, and the whole surmounted by a great eastern dome, or by campaniles partaking of all the compilations of the main buildings. St. Paul's itself is a noble building, notwithstanding all the manifest gleanings from the antique and the medieval, and their combination into a whole which has nothing original but their combination into one superb design.



Besides St. Paul's, the rest of his churches are disappointing, and we cannot avoid lamenting that Wren had lost the sense of the beauty of Gothic architecture, especially when we call to mind the exquisite churches of that style which adorn so many of the continental cities. Whilst the exteriors of Wren's churches show heavily in their huddled-up situations in our City streets, their interiors, in which much more of the Grecian and Roman styles are introduced, are equally heavy, and wanting in that pliant grace which distinguishes the interiors of our Gothic cathedrals. Perhaps the noblest work of Wren next, to St. Paul's is Greenwich Hospital, which is more purely Grecian, and therefore displays a more graceful and majestic aspect. The Palace of Hampton Court, attached to the fine old Tudor pile of cardinal Wolsey, is a great square mass, in which the Dutch taste of William is said to have set aside Wren’s original design. But surely William did not compel him to erect that ponderous barbarism of a Grecian colonnade in the second quadrangle of Hampton Court, attaching it to a Gothic building. In fact, neither Wren nor Inigo Jones appear to have had the slightest sense of the incongruity of such conjunctions. Jones actually erected a Grecian screen to the beautiful Gothic choir of Winchester Cathedral, and placed a Grecian bishop's throne in it, amid all the glorious canopy-work of that choir. The return to a better taste has swept these monstrosities away; but not so in the grand old Saxon cathedral of Durham, where one of Jones's Greek absurdities still truly screens all the simple beauties of the choir.

The fame of Wren must rest on St. Paul's, for in palaces he was less happy than in churches. His additions to Windsor Castle and St. James's Palace, and his erection of Marlborough House, are by no means calculated to do him great honour, whilst all lovers of architecture must lament the removal of a great part of Wolsey's palace at Hampton