THREE:The fame of Wren must rest on St. Paul's, for in palaces he was less happy than in churches. His additions to Windsor Castle and St. James's Palace, and his erection of Marlborough House are by no means calculated to do him high honour, whilst all lovers of architecture must deplore the removal of a great part of Wolsey's palace at Hampton Court to make way for Wren's structure. A glorious view, if old drawings are to be believed, must all that vast and picturesque variety of towers, battlements, tall mullioned windows, cupolas, and pinnacles, have made, as they stood under the clear heaven glittering in the sun. The writers who saw it in its glory describe it in its entireness as the most splendid palace in Europe. Of the campaniles of Wren, that of St. Bride's, Fleet Street; of Bow Church, Cheapside; of St. Dunstan's-in-the-East; and the tower of St. Michael's, Cornhill, are the finest. The last is almost his only Gothic one, and would have been a fine tower had the ornament been equally diffused over it, and not all been crowded too near the top. Wren was thwarted in his design for the London Monument. He drew a plan for one with gilt flames issuing from the loop-holes, and surmounted by a ph?nix, but as no such design could be found in the five Orders, it was rejected, and the existing commonplace affair erected. One of his last undertakings was the repair of Westminster Abbey, to which he added the towers at the west end, and proposed to erect a spire in the centre. Sir Christopher left a large quantity of drawings, which are preserved in All Souls' College library, Oxford.Were the ca?on of the Aravaypa in any other place than Arizona, which, as the intelligent public knows, is all one wide expanse of dry and thirsty country, a parched place in the wilderness, a salt land, and not inhabited; were it in any other place, it would be set forth in railway folders, and there would be camping privileges and a hotel, and stages would make regular trips to it, and one would come upon groups of excursionists on burros, or lunching among its boulders. Already it has been in a small way discovered, and is on the road to being vulgarized by the camera. The lover of Nature, he who loves the soul as well as the face of her, receives when he sees a photograph of a fine bit of scenery he had felt in a way his own property until then, something the blow that the lover of a woman does when he learns that other men than he have known her caresses.
