1709-1742.] WREN'S PARISH CHURCHES. 453 artist. Italian ecclesiastical architects had to a great extent adhered to the Roman basilica form. The wonderful Gothic builders of Northern Europe had almost invariably adopted that of the Latin cross. In our own country with a few exceptions, such as the round churches of the Templars, churches of any size or importance were cruciform. Inigo Jones had however in the church of St. Paul's, Covent Garden, for the first time imitated a Grecian temple. Wren as far as he was allowed cast aside precedent, and constructed his churches with the primary 'purpose of enabling the congregation to see and hear the clergyman. "The Romanists," he said, "built large churches; it was enough if they heard the murmur of the mass, and saw the elevation of the host; but ours are to be fitted for auditories." He has not wholly succeeded perhaps even in this respect, but he succeeded better than most later architects. The interiors of his churches are indeed generally admired by those who are not wedded to particular precedents, and think originality in ecclesiastical architecture a cardinal sin. Of his church interiors that of St. Stephen's, Walbroook, with its happy arrangement of columns, is the most general favourite, and if it were not that there is something more of solemnity wanting it would be most admirable. The auditory of this church he has covered with a cupola, so he has that of some others. Some he has made oval in plan, and covered with an elliptic cupola (as in St. Benetfink); others, like St. Mary's Abchurch, are square, and covered with a circular 454 WREN'S MISCELLANEOUS BUILDINGS. [1709-1742. dome; several are modelled on the Basilica; none have the form of the Latin cross.* If the interiors of his churches were designed for service, the towers were as certainly designed for effect. Mr. Cockerell in his admirable "Tribute to Sir Christopher Wren," has with the greatest care and judgment brought these remarkable examples of our great architect's genius together so that they may be readily compared with each other. But properly to appreciate them they must be studied in their actual positions; and then it will be seen not only how picturesque in form, they almost without exception are, but how happily they are adapted to their respective places; while everyone who looks over the city so as to see several of them grouped together will acknowledge the charm which their variety affords. Although whenever he directly imitated Gothic architecture he failed utterly-as in the towers he added to Westminster Abbey-these city steeples are a sufficient proof that Wren worked in the true Gothic spirit. We have dwelt thus long on Wren, and especially on his churches, because he is not only our first great English architect, but because he lived through the entire period of which we have to speak, and his churches are what are most characteristic of him and of his age. They are works not unimpeachable in an artistic point of view, but they are the works of a man of original thought, works of great constructional excellence, works illustrating an age of immense scientific knowledge and independent thought: in their way Wren and his cathedral are as characteristic of the age, as are Newton and his Principia. Had Wren not built either St. Paul's or his parish churches he would yet have been a great architect, though they throw all his other works into the shade. Some of his other works are indeed of no great mark. The Monument is not the common-place thing it has been represented to be, but it has not much of the originality of the Monument he originally designed. Marlborough House, and his additions to Hampton Court, say little for his skill as a builder of palaces; he was more successful in his additions to the palace at Greenwich -now Greenwich Hospital-and in Chelsea Hospital, a work well adapted to its purpose and site. His other more important buildings were:-in London, the Royal Exchange, Custom House, both long since destroyed, Temple Bar, and the College of Physicians, now a meat market; the Sheldonian Theatre, Ashmolean Museum, Queen's College Chapel, and Gateway at Christ's Church College, Oxford; the Library and other buildings at Trinity College, and the Chapel of Emmanuel College, Cambridge; the Observatory, Greenwich; and the unfinished palace of Charles II., at Winchester. Wren held the office of Surveyor-General from the reign of Charles II. to that of George I., when he was displaced to make way for a wretched creature named Benson, only remembered by his discreditable association with the name of Wren, the still more discreditable cause of his early ejection from the office into which he had been so unworthily inducted, and the place Pope has assigned him in the Dunciad. Wren now in his eightysixth year retired from public life and spent the brief remainder of his days, * See "Plans, Elevations, and Sections of the Parochial Churches of sir Christopher Wren, erected in the cities of London and Westminster," by John Clayton, fol. 1848. 1709-1742.] VANBRUGH. 455 says his son, "in contemplation and study, and principally in the consolation of the Holy Scriptures: cheerful in solitude and as well pleased to die in the shade as in the light." He had held the office of surveyor for five-and-forty years: his pay as architect of St. Paul's was £200 a-year; as architect of all the city churches, £100. He died at the ripe age of ninety; and his countrymen gave him a fitting burial-place, under the choir (it ought to have been under the glorious dome) of his own St. Paul's, and an epitaph worthy of the man and the place. What Wren did for ecclesiastical, Vanbrugh did, though in a lesser measure, for English palatial architecture. Like Wren, Vanbrugh did not adopt the profession of an architect till long after he had gained celebrity in a very different line. But whilst a profound acquaintance with mathematics and mechanics might seem a solid basis for constructional architecture, there was little promise that a writer of licentious comedies could at the age of five or six and thirty turn with success to the practice of a profession usually considered to require a laborious course of preparatory study. Vanbrugh's first, and in some respects his finest work, was the extensive palace of the earl of Carlisle, Castle Howard, a work that at once stamped him as a man of originality of conception, and unquestionable constructive ability. From this time he found no lack of employment, but all his 456 VANBRUGH. [1709-1742. commissions were for works of a similar character: he is not known to have erected a single public building, with the exception (if that can be called an exception) of a theatre in the Haymarket, which he built as a speculation of his own, and in which Congreve was his partner and Betterton his stagemanager. His chief work is Blenheim, of which he was appointed architect by the government, but in the execution of which he met with a long succession of vexations-first from the difficulty of obtaining supplies of money with sufficient regularity to carry on the work, and then, after the death of Marlborough, from the impetuous Duchess, who took the building out of his hands, and though she continued it according to his designs, would not pay him his salary, or permit him (or even his wife) to enter the grounds to see the outside of the structure he had designed. Among other of his last works may be named King's Weston, near Bristol; Grimsthorpe, Yorkshire, a very striking structure; Eastbury, Dorsetshire, now pulled down; Oulton Hall, Cheshire, and Seaton Delaval, Northumberland. Vanbrugh had to endure not only the censures of pompous dulness, but the keen shafts of the wits of his day, and perhaps even now his name is most commonly associated with one or other of their pungent epigrams. It cannot be denied that his works abound in incongruities, that the massiveness is often excessive, that the parts are too much broken up, that in aiming at picturesque variety he has produced a fritter of ill-connected parts: yet about them all there is richness, imagination, originality and power. Condemned by Swift, Pope, and Walpole, it became fashionable to sneer at Vanbrugh, till Reynolds, with the cordial fellow-feeling of genius saw that Vanbrugh had struck into a new path, and produced what may be called a pictorial style of architecture, and feeling so at once turned the current of popular opinion by boldly expressing his own. And after all that has been said of Vanbrugh, Reynolds's is the truest appreciation of the external character of his buildings: of their interiors we fear so much could scarcely be said with justice, unless it be of the halls which are always with him a magnificent feature. Reynolds says: "To speak of Vanbrugh in the language of a painter, he had originality of invention, he understood light and shadow, and had great skill in composition. To support his principal object, he produced his second and third groups or masses: he perfectly understood in his art what is the most difficult in ours, the conduct of the background; by which the design and invention is set off to the greatest advantage. What the background is in painting, in architecture is the real ground on which the building is erected; and no architect took greater care than he that his work should not appear crude and hard: that is, it did not abruptly start out of the ground without expectation or preparation. This is a tribute which a painter owes to an architect who composed like a painter; and was defrauded of the due reward of his merit by the wits of his time, who did not understand the principles of composition in poetry better than he; and who knew little or nothing, of what he understood perfectly, the general ruling principles of architecture and painting."* In church architecture Wren was succeeded by his pupil Hawksmoor and by Gibbs, for the exercise of whose talents a favourable opportunity was * Thirteenth Discourse. 1709-1742.] HAWKSMOOR AND GIBBS. 457 afforded by the Act of Anne, which provided for the erection of fifty new churches in London, though not nearly so many were built. Hawksmoor was a man of considerable original talent; but having been engaged to assist Vanbrugh in the erection of Castle Howard and some of his other works, he engrafted some of his new master's fancies upon the more masculine style of his original instructor. His best work is generally considered to be St. Mary's Woolnoth, Lombard-street, which has great merit both in the interior and exterior; but to our thinking Limehouse Church deserves at least to divide the crown with it. St. George's, Bloomsbury, also by him, has a portico of fine proportions; but though it has found defenders in our own day, the pyramidal steeple with its crowning statue is a huge absurdity. The chief work of Gibbs is the church of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, the portico of which has acquired much fame. But Gibbs, like Hawksmoor, failed to learn from Wren how to design, or where to place a tower and spire. Every one of Wren's towers rises directly from the ground, and has |