, in the presence of
the architect, the master builder, and a number of masons. This was in
the year 1710. Sir Christopher lived thirteen years longer, withdrawn
from active life in the country. Once a year, however, it was his custom
to visit the city, and sit for a while under the dome of the cathedral.
He died peacefully while dozing in his arm-chair after dinner, in 1723,
aged ninety-two years, having lived one of the most interesting and
victorious lives ever enjoyed by a mortal.

If the people of London are proud of what was done by Sir Christopher
Wren, they lament perhaps still more what he was not permitted to do.
They are now attempting to execute some of his plans. Miss Lucy
Phillimore, his biographer, says:--

"Wren laid before the king and Parliament a model of the city as he
proposed to build it, with full explanations of the details of the
design. The street leading up Ludgate Hill, instead of being the
confined, winding approach to St. Paul's that it now is, even its
crooked picturesqueness marred by the Viaduct that cuts all the lines of
the cathedral, gradually widened as it approached St. Paul's, and
divided itself into two great streets, ninety feet wide at the least,
which ran on either side of the cathedral, leaving a large open space in
which it stood. Of the two streets, one ran parallel with the river
until it reached the Tower, and the other led to the Exchange, which
Wren meant to be the centre of the city, standing in a great piazza, to
which ten streets each sixty feet wide converged, and around which were
placed the Post-Office, the Mint, the Excise Office, the Goldsmiths'
Hall, and the Insurance, forming the outside of the piazza. The smallest
streets were to be thirty feet wide, 'excluding all narrow, dark alleys
without thoroughfares, and courts.'

"The churches were to occupy commanding positions along the principal
thoroughfares, and to be 'designed according to the best forms for
capacity and hearing, adorned with useful porticoes and lofty
ornamental towers and steeples in the greater parishes. All church
yards, gardens, and unnecessary vacuities, and all trades that use great
fires or yield noisome smells to be placed out of town.'

"He intended that the church yards should be carefully planted and
adorned, and be a sort of girdle round the town, wishing them to be an
ornament to the city, and also a check upon its growth. To burials
within the walls of the town he strongly obje