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solid stateliness of the lofty structure impaired, but rather improved, by these embellishments. is to be regretted that one who could so readily unite beauty and strength, and communicate so much becoming elegance to all the manifold combinations of the Gothic, had not been employed to build a new cathedral. His colleges are rather for worth than show: plain accommodation was all that was necessary; yet in the chapels, particularly in that of New. College, there is no ordinary beauty.

From our old historians, our public records, and a few brief instructions, of the days of Wykeham, concerning the royal buildings, we gather some curious information about the mode of erecting cathedrals. The site of the church was selected, not in a barren spot, but in a pleasant place, where the soil was naturally fruitful, and lakes or streams containing fish were near.

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foundations of the structure were marked out, and around this a camp of huts was established, to afford shelter to the workmen: a warden was appointed to every ten men, and over the whole a clerk of the works presided, whose duty was to see the building executed according to the plans of the chief architect. Those workmen, if the need of the church required great diligence, had many indulgences: and if they were refractory, there were modes of bringing them to reason, spiritual as well as temporal. The masonry was the work of Englishmen; and much of the carving, as our memorandums sufficiently show, was cut by native hands. The caprice or taste of the workmen seems sometimes to have directed the acces

sorial ornaments; for many of our cathedrals are deformed by figures of indecent demons, and other grotesque and impure representations, which mingle indifferently with things holy. To save the purse of the state, or the hoards of the clergy, the noble families of the district, from a love of religion, or as a commutation of penance, permitted their forests to be felled, their quarries to be wrought, their vassals to be pressed, and their horses too, in order to facilitate the good work. Wren, who was no admirer of their architecture, speaks with knowledge and with justice of their way of going to work. "Those who have seen the exact amounts in records," says he, "of the charge of the fabrics of some of our cathedrals, near four hundred years old, cannot but have a great esteem for their economy, and admire how soon they erected such lofty structures. Indeed, great height they thought the greatest magnificence. Few stones were used but what a man might carry up a ladder on his back from scaffold to scaffold, though they had pullies and spoked wheels upon occasion; but having rejected cornices, they had no need of great engines: stone upon stone was easily piled up to great heights; therefore the pride of their work was in pinnacles and steeples. In this they essentially differed from the Roman way, who laid all their mouldings horizontally, which made the best perspective: the Gothic way, on the contrary, carried all their mouldings perpendicular, so that the ground-work being settled, they had nothing else to do but to spire all up as they could. Thus they made their pillars of a bundle of little Toruses, which they

divided into more when they came to the roof; and these Toruses split into many small ones, and traversing one another, gave occasion to the tracery work of which the Freemasons were the inventors. They used the sharp-headed arch which would rise with little centreing, required lighter key-stones and less butment, and yet would bear another row of doubled arches rising from the keystone, by the diversifying of which they erected eminent structures. It must be confessed that this was an ingenious compendium of work, suited to those northern climates; and I must also own, that works of the same height and magnificence, in the Roman way, would be much more expensive." The facility with which those edifices were reared was aided much by the command which a feudal prince had over his people; but more by the power of the Church over hordes of illiterate workmen, who had at once before their eyes the fear of hell, the hope of heaven, and the impulse of good wages.

The architecture in which Wykeham excelled, and the religion which he so ardently loved, were doomed to sink in this land together. Against the latter, knowledge and reason and Scripture were directed; against the former, classic caprice and the pedantry of learning preached a crusade; and where one only merited success, both succeeded. Our reliance on the taste of John Evelyn, of which we hear so much, is sorely shaken by reading his evidence concerning the Gothic. "The ancient Greek and Roman architecture," says he, answers all the perfections required in a faultless and accomplished building; such as for

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so many ages were so renowned and reputed by the universal suffrages of the civilized world, and would doubtless have still subsisted, and made good their claim, had not the Goths and Vandals subverted and demolished them, introducing in their stead a certain fantastical and licentious manner of building, which we have since called Modern or Gothic; congestions of heavy, dark, melancholy, and monkish piles, without any just proportion, use, or beauty." We look at the churches of York, Lincoln, Salisbury, or Winchester, and smile at the pedantry of the amiable Evelyn.

INIGO JONES.

"WERE a table to be formed," exclaims Walpole, "for men of real and undisputed genius in every country, this name alone would save England from the reproach of not having her representative among the arts; she adopted Holbein and Vandyke; she borrowed Rubens; she produced Inigo Jones."

He was born in 1572, in the neighbourhood of St. Paul's Cathedral, London. His mother's maiden name or country no one has mentioned; while of his father we are only told that his name was Ignatius, that he was a citizen of London, a cloth-worker by trade, a catholic in religion, and wealthy and reputable. I know not what credit to give to Pennant, who claims the architect for a Welchman, on account of his "violent passions ;" though Gifford, in his notes to Ben Jonson, seems to follow him, drawing the same inference from the "untamed vehemence of his language." "It is observable," says his son-in-law Webb, "that his Christian name is in Spanish, and his father's in Latin; for which some have assigned this reason, that, as his father was a considerable dealer in the woollen manufactory, 'tis probable some Spanish merchant might have assisted at his baptism." It is likely that Webb communicates to us the tradition of the family; yet personal regard, or