=The Lantern.=--The Golden Gallery is almost exactly a hundred feet
above the Stone Gallery. The Lantern is an elegant and graceful piece
of design and workmanship, and consists of three square stages, each
of them with lights and with recesses (or chamfered, so to speak) at
the angles. The second has Corinthian columns, which must be fifteen
feet in height, and a plain entablature, and some more urn-shaped
pedestals. The third is completed with a miniature dome, and has upper
and lower lights in each face. Standing immediately underneath, or by
Nelson's tomb in the Crypt, these lights produce a striking and almost
unique effect. The present gilt ball and cross, which crown the
edifice, replaced the originals of Francis Bird, being put up by
Cockerell--the then Clerk to the Works--in 1821. The extreme height is
from 363 to 365 feet, and in 1848 the Ordnance Survey placed a "crow's
nest" against the cross for the purpose of observations from the
highest attainable point.

Miss Lucy Phillimore has published a paper of Wren's in which the
Surveyor remarks that for the architect it is necessary "_in a
conspicuous Work to preserve His Undertaking from general censure, and
so for him to accommodate his Designs to the Geist of the Age he lives
in, though it appear to him less rational_." As regards the height of
the dome, we are the gainers because he was compelled to do this. It
is not, indeed, the whole of St. Paul's or its only important feature;
for St. Paul's is not a Byzantine church in which the dome is
practically not a part, but the whole. It is the most magnificent
member of a magnificent building, and with its graceful equipoise and
conscious evidence of stability stands alone and in a class by itself
amongst the cathedral superstructures of the land.

FOOTNOTES:

[69] Fergusson's "History on the Modern Styles of Architecture," p.
243. The Pantheon at Rome as restored A.D. 202 was, or rather is, a
rotunda with a portico. The rotunda, according to Fergusson
("Handbook," p. 311), is about 125 feet in internal diameter, and an
external elevation of about 150 feet. The Basilica of Maxentius, or
Temple of Peace, may have been finished in the reign of Constantine
(Maxentius, A.D. 311-312; Constantine the Great, 325-337). The ruins
show an oblong of 265 feet by 195 feet in internal measurement,
including aisles. The whole length is divided into only three bays
("Handbook," p. 319). Fergusson should have added St. Pet