CHAP. XIII. 336 S. PAUL'S RESTORED BY INIGO JONES. should seem most iniquitous, stretch of power, the Parliamentary Government made the innocent architect, Inigo Jones, pay largely towards the compensation; but Inigo, the designer of the scenery for the splendid, costly, and heathenish masques of James and Charles, was not likely to find favour with a Puritan majority in Parliament. The church of S. Gregory, which stood in the way, abutting on the cathedral at the south-west corner, was removed without scruple, and rebuilt on a more convenient site. The removal of this church was another of Laud's offences, charged against him on his trial.3 In the restoration of S. Paul's,' writes Horace Walpole, 'Inigo made two capital faults. He first renewed the sides with very bad Gothic, and then added a Roman 'portico, magnificent and beautiful indeed, but which had no affinity with the ancient parts that remained, and made 'the Gothic appear ten times heavier.' The first of these capital faults was inevitable. Throughout christendom the feeling, the skill, the tradition of Gothic architecture had entirely died out. It had lingered in England longer than on the continent. Its last two splendid, if too florid and decorate, achievements, King's College Chapel, Cambridge, and Henry VIIth's Chapel at Westminster, might seem to have exhausted its creative energy. The Reformers wanted issues more arbitrary mandates. The but, like booths at a fair, standing on the public way, and so subject to the control of the Mayor and Aldermen, Probably the goldsmiths had as much to do with the regulation as Laud and the Council and the Chapter of S. Paul. Hallam, vol. i. c. ii. p. 438. Rushworth abridged, pp. 79, 313. 3 S. Gregory's must have been speedily rebuilt, for there was a dispute a few years after between the parishioners and the ecclesiastical authorities about the position of the communion table. not for their new churches the wealth which had been lavished on the old; they required not for their simpler worship the vastness, height, long processional aisles, broad naves, and rich choirs. They gradually, therefore, lost their reverence for those wonderful structures. The great Jesuit reaction, simultaneous with the revival of classical art, while labouring to resuscitate mediæval doctrines, mediæval sacerdotal authority, mediæval Papalism, repudiated, it might seem deliberately, mediæval architecture and mediæval art, the great strength of the middle ages. Inigo Jones was an Italian in all but birth; he had studied in Italy; in Italy imbibed his principles, his tastes, his feelings. In Italy he had found the models which he condescended to imitate, which he aspired to equal or surpass. Whether he deigned to notice on his way to Italy the noble French cathedrals--Amiens, Rheims, Bourges, or those on the Rhine, Cologne and Strasbourg-appears not. His studies had been chiefly at Rome, where there was but one, and that a very inferior, Gothic church, in Florence, in Vicenza. In Italy the name Gothic, of the same import as barbarous, was now looked upon, spoken of, written of, with utter contempt. No wonder then that the Gothic of Inigo Jones, though we may not accept Walpole's judgement as to genuine Gothic, was undeniably bad. His aim, indeed, on the sides of the building seems to have been no more than repair, to make the building secure against weather, to face it throughout, to cut away the decayed stone, the ruined string courses, the ornamental tracery and windows, which he replaced without regard to the original design, as suited his own notions of proportion and symmetry. The new building looked smooth and fresh. It showed a dull flat uniformity, instead of the old bold projections, and the venerable, timeworn, if dark and cumbrous, and ill Ꮓ СНАР. XIII. CHAP. harmonised perhaps, but massy and imposing, arches and buttresses. On the West front Inigo dared to indulge his creative powers. The west façade of the old Cathedral, it should seem, had never been perfectly finished. It had none of th grandeur, richness, and variety of the nobler Gothic edifices. the deep receding arches, with their triple doors and sculptured canopies, their splendid rose windows (the rose window here was poor and insignificant) rising above the porch, instinet with sculpture above, below, within, on every side. Kent's designs show the plan and elevation of the West front as it appeared from the hands of Inigo Jones. The ' entire West front measures 161 feet long and 162 feet 'high from the ground to the top of the cross. A tower at each angle rises 140 feet, while over them ascends the 'central peak, ornamented with pinnacles terminating in a cross, and forming a screen to the end of the main roo: ' of the building. The whole of this front is of the Corinthian order rusticated, and may be described as cumbrous in form but picturesque in effect. It is far otherwise with that noble portico, to which the work I have described 'serves at once as a background and a contrast. This 'reaches in length 120 feet over the bases of the columns, and rises 66 feet, measuring from the first step-of 'which there are five-to the summit of the balustrade. There is no pediment, inasmuch as the picturesque rusticated peak performs in some degree the part of a pediment; nor is the effect, though startling at first, at all unpleasant, though it rises nearly eighteen feet above the 'pediment. There are in all fourteen fluted columns, of ' which eight stand in front and three on either side; nor are these last crowded, for the projection measures fortytwo feet at each angle. There is a square pilaster, pro'portioned and diminished like its circular companions, |