er
following; some by the surveyor, and others by the master-mason,
Strong. There seems to have been no religious service or great
ceremony.

[66] Macaulay, followed by others, speaks merely of the "opening"; the
prayer I have quoted from Dugdale shows that the opening was a
consecration service. I am unaware that the rest of the cathedral has
ever been consecrated; and if not, it resembles Lincoln and many
another mediaeval church (Freeman's "Wells," p. 77).

[67] June 27, 1706; December 31, 1706; May 1, 1707 (for the Union);
August 19, 1708.

[68] Harleian MS. 4941, quoted in Dugdale, p. 140, note. This was at
the beginning.

_NEW ST. PAUL'S._

[Illustration: ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL, FROM THE WEST.]

CHAPTER V.

NEW ST. PAUL'S.

EXTERIOR.

"It would be difficult to find two works of Art designed more
essentially on the same principle than Milton's 'Paradise Lost' and
Wren's St. Paul's Cathedral. The Bible narrative transposed into the
forms of a Greek epic, required the genius of a Milton to make it
tolerable; but the splendour of even his powers does not make us less
regret that he had not poured forth the poetry with which his heart
was swelling in some form that would have freed him from the trammels
which the pedantry of his age imposed upon him. What the Iliad and the
AEneid were to Milton, the Pantheon and the Temple of Peace were to
Wren. It was necessary he should try to conceal his Christian Church
in the guise of a Roman Temple. Still the idea of the Christian
cathedral is always present, and reappears in every form, but so, too,
does that of the Heathen temple--two conflicting elements in
contact--neither subduing the other, but making their discord so
apparent as to destroy to a very considerable extent the beauty either
would possess if separate."[69]

I give this quotation at length, not because I by any means agree with
one half of the fault-finding, but because it helps to explain the
architecture. St. Paul's is often called "Classical," or "Roman," or
"Italian"; it is not one of these three: it is English Renaissance. It
was, too, a distinctly happy thought of Fergusson to suggest that the
Cathedral takes a like place in English architecture to that which the
immortal "Paradise Lost" does in English literature. The ground-plan
suggests the Gothic; the pilasters and entablature the Greek and
Roman; the round arch is found in both Roman and Romanesque, and that
commanding f