[62] "Parentalia," pp. 281-282, shows how questions of finance entered into Wren's conception of his famous First Design.
[64] Wren's numerous designs and drawings are undated, and the "Parentalia" is anything but clear. In consequence there has been a certain amount of confusion as to the identity both of the First Design and of the approved Warrant Design.
[65] Some say by the Bishop Humphrey Henchman, who died in the October 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 mediæval 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.
[Illustration: ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL, FROM THE WEST.]
"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 Æneid 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 feature, the Dome, is the common property of many styles and many ages. The general plan resembles the long or Latin Cross, with transepts of greater breadth than length; and the uniformity is broken by an apse at the east, and the two chapels at the west end.