among Wren's earliest finished works; and it was on the completion of the original building, in 1673, that he received the honor of knighthood. The following forty years of a life passed in the service of his country saw the completion of the fabric of St. Paul's; of the fifty-one churches erected from his designs in the city of London; the Royal Hospital of Chelsea; the College of Physicians; the extensive works at Windsor; the palace of Winchester, left incomplete; that of Hampton Court, vitiated by the Dutch taste of William III., who rejected Wren's original design; Marlborough House, St. James's; the Monument of London; several of the halls of the city companies, and numerous works of less account. To analyze even the principal of these would lead us far beyond the limits of general history; but some critical notice can not be altogether withheld. In this inquiry the churches claim the first place, not only in regard to their number, but because it is in his ecclesiastical edifices that the originality of Wren's genius shines most conspicuously. In his churches Wren appears as an inventor. He had the problem to solve of adapting them to the forms of worship of the church of England, for which no precedent existed, and he has essayed various forms with various degrees of success. They may be divided into three classes :-domed churches; those of the basilical form, i, e., with nave and side aisles; and simple rectangular plans without columns. At the head of the first class stands the justly cel

INTERIOR OF ST. STEPHEN'S, WALBROOK.

ebrated fane of St. Stephen, Walbrook-a work unsurpassed in masterly composition and graceful proportions, to which is superadded a degree of refinement and delicacy of taste not always apparent in the works of its author. St. Benet Fink is re

markable chiefly for the ingenuity with which the difficulties of a confined and irregular site have been overcome. St. Mildred's, in Bread-street, is a small church of this class, without columns, and deriving its beauty from its simplicity. St. Magnus is a noble building of the second class, of the lonic order, but injured by an unaccountable irregularity in the intercolumniation. St. Bartholomew's, near the Bank, and St. Michael's, Cornhill, are composed altogether on the ancient plan, with arches springing from single columns, a clerestory above, and a recess for the altar; and the satisfactory result produced by these combinations seems to vindicate the basilical form as the most characteristic of ecclesiastical edifices. The former, especially, in a style of the most perfect simplicity, is strikingly effective from its harmonious proportions and the good keeping of all its parts. Bow Church is a composition of much grandeur, though it has suffered some wrong in the process of adaptation from the Temple of Peace at Rome, a favorite authority among the monuments of antiquity with Wren, who misquotes it in defense of some indefensible solecisms in the interior of St. Paul's. In this church the galleries are well introduced. In his management of these obstructions, Wren has not always been successful. In some cases he has raised the pedestals of his columns to an extravagant disproportion, in order that they may serve also as props to the galleries, of which St. Swithen's, in Cannon-street-a domed church with columns reduced to insignificance by the stilts on which they are raised-and Christ Church, in Newgate-street, may be cited as examples. But in other instances, where he has placed the galleries on supports of their own, and established an order above to carry the roof, he has produced, in a high degree, that union of beauty and usefulness in which he surpasses all other architects, and has established a precedent which has regulated the majority of modern English churches. The church of St. James, Westminster, is of this class, and is an edifice worthy of the author of St. Stephen's, Walbrook, as far as the interior is concerned. The outside bas the unpardonable fault of being plain without being simple. Of the third class of Wren's churches, want of character is a prevailing fault, some of the plainer sort differing from ordinary halls in little but the extraneous fittings: but these are, in many instances, sufficient of themselves to merit observation, as in the church of St. Edmund the King, which is raised to the dignity of the ecclesiastical style chiefly by the picturesque grouping and rich carvedwork of the pews. St. Lawrence, Jewry, one of the finest of the London churches, is also of this class; an irregularity in the plan, said to have been committed for the purpose of giving it a resemblance to a gridiron, is in nowise injurious to the noble and effective style of decoration which is its characteristic. The exterior is also to be noted, as being the most Palladian of Wren's designs.

Thus far the interiors of these buildings have been principally considered; externally they exhibit but little that calls for remark. The majority are huddled into corners or ranged in narrow avenues, where

travagant height of the stylobate and attic into which the architect was driven in attempting to obtain a suitable altitude. At St. Peter's a column has been adopted of such dimensions that no attainable material would suffice for the entablature, which has, consequently, been restricted and stunted even to deformity. This fault, and many others necessarily contingent upon working to a disproportionate module in a building adapted to modern purposes, have been successfully avoided at St. Paul's by the use of two orders; and, whatever faults that expedient may have entailed, it will hardly be disputed that the exterior architecture of St. Paul's is both better in composition and sounder in style than that of its more magnificent rival.

In the adaptation of the old basilical form to Italian architecture, a great difficulty has always been experienced in reconciling the low flanks of the

side aisles with the elevated front of the nave. The principal elevation of the original basilica of the ancients was on the side; the pyramidical façades of the Romanesque churches and the flying buttresses of the pointed style exhibit, without disguise, the real form of the building; but to the Italian architect it has always proved a stumbling-block, and few have passed over it with credit. The usual expedient to which they have resorted is, to mask the end of the nave with a second order, and, as this superstructure has no proper correspondence with any thing within, Forsyth has pithily called the fronts of the Roman churches" a splendid lie." What shall be said of St. Paul's? The deception is carried all round the building, and on the flanks the upper order is a mere screen-wall, concealing the roof and the buttresses which sustain the vaulting of the nave and choir. To the internal effect the upper

order contributes nothing. Upon entering the church the discrepancy is at once detected between the low and confined space of the side aisles and the perpendicular altitude outside, while the order of the nave is exaggerated and crowned by a disproportioned attic, for the purpose of exalting it into something like an accordance with the elevation. It may be doubted whether the superiority of the exterior of St. Paul's has not been attained at too great a sacrifice of principle.

ure in the building, and rises from the body of the church in grent majesty. Nothing can be more pleasing and harmonious than its outline and proportions, nothing more pure in style than the peristyle with its unbroken entablature. "It may be safely affirmed," says an excellent critic, that for dignity and elegance no church in Europe affords an example worthy of comparison with this cupola."

1 Gwilt, in Britton's Public Buildings of London, where the reader may refer to the plans and sections of St. Paul's and several other of the