The old cathedral was not due east and west, neither did it directly face Ludgate Hill. Owing to the lie of the land cleared away, both of these peculiarities were increased by the surveyor, and the axis of the New St. Paul's was swung some seven degrees further north than the Old. He thereby made the best of his somewhat cramped site, and avoided the foundations of the old walls. The excavations were not completed nor the site fully cleared and made ready until 1674.
[Illustration: RELATIVE POSITION AND AREA OF THE GROUND-PLANS OF OLD AND NEW ST. PAUL'S. _Reproduced from Longman's "Three Cathedrals of St. Paul's."_]
It has been the lament of many that the Pointed arch had by the time of the Fire died out, and that the Renaissance style, borrowed from Italy, had taken the place in England of Gothic architecture. "About two hundred years ago," we are told in the "Parentalia," "when ingenious Men began to reform the _Roman_ Language to the Purity which they assigned and fixed to the Time of _Augustus_ and of that Century, the Architects also, ashamed of the modern Barbarity of Building, began to examine carefully the Ruins of _Old Rome_ and _Italy_; to search into the Orders and Proportions, and to establish them by inviolable Rules: so to their Labour and Industry we owe in a great Degree the Restoration of Architecture." Here we have the Renaissance style defined. Wren would naturally have fallen in with the fashion of his own time; and the faults he found in his elaborate surveys at Old St. Paul's, Salisbury, and elsewhere confirmed him in his adherence. He found "a Discernment of no contemptible Art, Ingenuity and geometrical Skill in the Design and Execution of some few"; but this was more than counterbalanced by grave faults: "An affectation of Height and Grandeur, tho' without Regularity and good Proportion, in most of them." They are loaded with too much carving and tracery, and in other ways offend his taste, but chiefly in the neglect of a due regard to stability. "There is scarce any _Gothick_ Cathedral, that I have seen, at home or abroad, wherein I have not observed the Pillars to yield and bend inwards from the Weight of the Vault of the Aile.... For this Reason this Form of Churches has been rejected by modern Architects abroad who use the better and _Roman_ Art of Architecture.... Almost all the Cathedrals of the _Gothick_ Form are weak and defective in the Poise of the Vault of the Aile."[60] On the other hand, he reckoned the dome "a form of church-building unknown in England, but of wonderful Grace," and, moreover, the dome wasted a minimum of space, whilst a mediæval cathedral could accommodate only a small auditory in proportion to its large area, so that every one could both see and hear. Any place of worship was in his eyes badly or imperfectly constructed in which the preacher's voice could not travel so as to be distinctly heard. There is much to be said on both sides in regard to the comparative merits of Gothic and Renaissance; and instead of echoing complaints, it is surely better to be thankful we have one cathedral, situated in the greatest centre of population, in the latter style.[61]