becomes more vital and spontaneous. If, however, Wren's work is very English, it is plain that a thing may be so, although England never produced its like before. Anything more novel in its day, more individual and personal than Wren's designs, can rarely be met with. It is not necessary, then, that to be very English we should renounce our times because they are new and unprecedented. We may venture to live now, instead of dreaming that we were contemporaries of Sir Roger de Coverley, and may try to meet the wants of our neighbours rather than those of our great-great-grandfathers. To say this is not to be insensible to the charm of all that lingers on from an age that was and is not. It is only too easy to turn away from the difficult present and the doubtful future to that incomparable dream

"So sweet, so sad, the days that are no more."

But every period has not only the melancholy pleasure of looking back to what went before, but also the pressing duty of bringing out such good as may be in it. The time that creates nothing will not be remembered with reverence or regret; and when it takes its place among bygone centuries, it will be "without honour among the dead for ever." Wren's work shows how it is possible to act for the present and yet not break with the past; how to be thoroughly original and yet thoroughly national. His buildings were foreign in style; their details came from Rome, not from Lincoln or York. They were novel in conception; the nearest parallels to many of them are in France, or Italy, or Spain. But Wren made his style a servant and not a master, and far from fearing to use it as it had never been used before, he seems half-ashamed of himself when he falls into a customary groove. No precedent was a law to him, all precedents were suggestions or warnings. He held fast what attracted him, he threw away everything by which he was repelled; and so, choosing and ordering his materials according to his own sincerest preferences, he shaped a most alien style into the natural outgrowth of an English city.

In truthfulness and reasonableness, in the practice of making his architecture rise out of and express the real facts of his buildings, Wren was mainly an architect of the olden kind. He was seldom a mere provider of façades-an applier of the "five orders" to any sort of dead wall, or pierced wall, that might first happen to suggest itself. He worked like genuine architects in all ages, and not like those fitterson of architectural fineries and dressings of whom in this country Inigo Jones was one of the first and cleverest. He designed from the inside outwards, and not from the outside inwards; he thought more of the form than the dress, and more of the life than of either. Instead of borrowing the beautiful which had served some bygone end, he produced new beauty in the very fulfilment of present needs.

It would have been well if the same originality had oftener been attempted in our own times. With us, mediæval church plans have, as a rule, been closely followed in spite of their inconvenience. Old arrangements have been repeated when very different ones were required.* A church was wanted, perhaps, for a modern town; the want has been met by a copy of one from a Northamptonshire village. A church was required for a large congregation; in answer to the requirement you got one modelled on that of a monastery. You wished all the congregation to join in the service : you found a third of them shut out by the nave piers. You wanted a building fit for the work of English Christianity to-day: you were presented with one designed for the Roman Catholicism of A.D. 1300. And the whole blame cannot fairly fall on the architects, for the people loved to have it so. There is still little sympathy for anyone who, in this branch of art belongs to his own period, and gives his days and nights to its yet unconquered problems. It will make as much for his popularity as for his ease if he shuts his eyes to the chaos of the modern world; if he abandons the thought of bringing its smallest fragment into order, and if he contentedly throws away his life in forging sham-antiques to suit the fashion of the hour.

So did not Wren. His churches were planned to meet the wants of his time. His buildings in their day were modern; in far less perfection, yet in the same sense as that in which old Greek and Gothic buildings were modern once. These masters of the art rejoiced in making their productions fresh, novel, unprecedented; and so in his way did Wren. The doings of the last forty years would have startled him; for he never dreamed, on the one hand, of making all the old churches look new, nor, on the other, of making all the new ones look old. He did not leave the trail of the restorer on his predecessors' work, and he did not copy that work slavishly, as if he too were not a man. Society in his times laid great stress on preaching; and for preaching, quite as much as for worship, his churches were built. Wren did not seek this condition, or make it. It is not for an architect to tell the people who come to him for what purposes they are to build. It is for him, on the contrary, to ascertain the purposes, and then fulfil them as completely as he can. This is just what Wren did. He accepted the condition that his parochial churches were, above all things, to be fit for preaching in ; and he planned them so that an ordinary voice can be heard through

It has even been said, by people who have rot yet mastered an elementary distinction like that between the style of a building (such as Greek, Gothic, Renaissance, &c.), and its form of plan (such as oblong, cruciform, polygonal, &c.), that churches on a new type of arrangement cannot possibly be "pure Gothic," or, in other words, that new thoughts cannot be grammatically expressed in an old language. On this theory, "In Memoriam" cannot be in pure English, because it is not a mere echo of "Lycidas;" nor Mill's essay On Liberty," because it is not simply an amplification of Bacon's "On Unity in Religion."

out. In a letter dated 1708, and preserved in the "Parentalia," he records some of the principles on which he did this. "A moderate voice," he says, may be heard fifty feet in front of the speaker, twenty feet behind him, and thirty feet on each side." It is an under-estimate in each direction; but even with this allowance it is easy to see that the very long plans of our old Gothic churches were out of the question. Nave piers or columns, too, in the regulation double row, were things to be avoided if possible; and again, if a larger congregation had to be provided for than an area of about eighty feet by sixty feet will hold, it became necessary, on Wren's principles, to put part of them in galleries.

It may be admitted at once that Wren achieved no great success in the treatment of his galleries. He did not think out their position or their design as he thought out the planning of his buildings in general. They look as if they were forced upon him against his will, and as if he felt that the responsibility for them rested with others. So far, doubtless, he was to blame. But he had not in this matter our advantages; for he did not know-what every one now knows or may know with what admirable effect the architects of central and south-eastern Europe had long used these and kindred features. His largest churches are those in which the galleries are most prominent, and for this reason they are rarely the best. St. Andrew's, Holborn, for instance, is a mere oblong nave, ninety-one feet by sixty-four, divided into the usual three avenues by six columns on each side. There is a shallow chancel, and a deep gallery over each aisle. St. Bride's is a similar church, a little smaller; and Christ Church, Newgate Street, a similar one, a little larger. These show his version of that "conventional church type" which has come down to us from the Middle Ages, and which still flourishes in our midst. Anything more inconvenient for a congregation could not readily be devised, and the addition of galleries made the scheme as ugly as it is inconvenient.

This is how things went with Wren when he bowed to precedent, and copied for a church meant for preaching in, the arrangements devised in remote ages for a very different end. He met with quite other results when in his plans, as in his towers, he took up less familiar types, and allowed his mind to act freely on them. His best church plans, like his best towers, are in essence chiefly postRoman; but while there is more northern influence traceable in the latter, there is often more eastern feeling in the former. A little thought will show that this is a natural and reasonable difference. The typical Gothic church plan is an avenue; the typical Byzantine church plan is a central area. The one is arranged along an axis; the other is grouped around a point. Avenue plans, it is true, may be found in the east, and central area plans in the north and west

Now, Wren's

of Europe; but on the whole this is the division. experience showed him that churches built, as his were, for preaching in, must for acoustic reasons be short and wide. The alternatives were to treat them as stunted avenue plans, or as well-shaped central area plans. We have seen how the former turned out at St. Andrew's, Holborn, and elsewhere; it remains to inquire how the latter succeeded.

That the main feature of St. Paul's is its central area, every one knows. The space under the dome, which is, roughly speaking, about 100 feet square, was certainly intended for the use of a congregation. It is usually supposed that Ely Cathedral suggested the treatment of this central space, which, however, like most types of the class, first originated in the Greek church. The rudiments of this design, in which a square is brought into an octagon by means of columns, and is finally domed over, are found at St. Mary's, Abchurch, and St. Swithin, Cannon Street. But the most perfect adaptation of it which Wren ever produced exists at St. Stephen's, Walbrook. Here, as in his smaller churches generally, there is nothing noticeable on the outside. He reserved his strength for towers and interiors, and an admirable interior he has here designedadmirable, that is, in general form and proportion; not admirable, any more than his other works, when one comes to criticise the minor details. The outer walls form a plain oblong; within this there are sixteen columns so cleverly placed as scarcely to cause any obstruction to sight. Twelve of them enclose the central area. This is square on the ground-floor, cruciform above, and octagonal at a higher level; the octagon being finally crowned by a circular dome, from the eye of which a flood of light is poured into the middle of the church. Thus, out of a naturally ill-proportioned room about 75 by 60 feet, Wren, with simple means but with consummate skill, produced a church which is renowned wherever architecture is studied. This was his reward for abandoning outworn precedents; and this, compared with St. Andrew's or St. Bride's, will help us to decide whether avenue plans or central area plans are likely to be most artistic for buildings in which a single voice has to be distinctly audible.

Wren, however, when he got free from the common nave and aisles plan, did not by any means confine himself to that with an octagonal space. Different sites necessitate different arrangements, and he was far too much of an artist to adopt one stereotyped idea everywhere. His church plans are full of variety. It is singular to observe how he anticipated many of the forms which have been proposed in recent times with a view to meet the wants of town congregations. The church with narrow aisles, for instance, in which the usual rows of nave piers are moved towards the walls, so as to be out of the way of the people, was discussed not many years ago as if

it had been a startling novelty. Few persons knew, apparently, that two specimens of the class-St. Peter's, Cornhill, and St. James's, Garlick Hill, were already standing in the very midst of London. The useful plans in which a small number of columns only are employed, instead of the customary double row of them, had also been largely used by Wren. Of this sort are St. Martin's, Ludgate, St. Anne and St. Agnes, St. Mary-le-Bow, St. Mary-at-Hill, and St. Augustine's, Watling Street. Most of these have four columns, which are occasionally formed into two nave arcades of three bays each, but are oftener and better moved towards the corners of the plan to allow of a central dome or cross-vault. This idea was originally Roman, but it found more favour in the east than in the west; and after being adopted in churches at Ephesus, at Thessalonica, and at Athens, it was finally copied on a large scale in the great mosques at Constantinople. It is, in fact, a central area plan of another species than that used at St. Paul's and St. Stephen's, Walbrook. The apsidal-ended nave with the chancel opening out from the middle bay of its apse, which exists at San Saturnino, Pamplona, and which was revived by the late Mr. Street, I think at Eastbourne, had been already experimented on by Wren at St. Clement Danes. And even the singular nave plan of St. Gereon, Cologne—an elongated polygon approximating to an ellipse-had been unconsciously followed by him at St. Benetfink, Threadneedle Street. All these, and some others, which have been recently advocated, he tried, and more or less succeeded with, in his lifelong effort to meet the practical wants which he had to provide for, and yet to meet them in a dignified and artistic way.

The principles on which his smaller churches are designed differ considerably from those which may be traced at St. Paul's. In them he was aiming at certain definite ends and uses, which shaped each building from its origin to its close. It was his wish to make St. Paul's also fulfil those purposes which in his day still remained to a cathedral, and to let them govern its whole arrangement. Here he was over-ruled the design he had prepared was rejected, and he was given to understand that the promoters simply wished him to repeat, in the Roman style, the kind of building which from custom people associated with the word " cathedral." He submitted, and with disappointment and grief has left us in St. Paul's, not the best that he could have done, but only the best that he was allowed to do. So it is with architects. A painter may paint what he will; a sculptor may model what he will; a musician may compose and a poet may write whatever each sees to be best; but an architect can go no further than his clients will follow him. He may make drawings, indeed; but the drawing of an unexecuted building does not even show that it would have been possible to execute it-much less that it would have been satisfactory at all points within and without.