FORE:The greater part of the House, as well as the public out of doors, were captivated with the scheme, which promised thus easily to relieve them of the monster debt; but Sir Grey Cooper was the first to disturb these fairy fancies. He declared that the whole was based on a fallacious statement; that it was doubtful whether the actual surplus was as described; but even were it so, that it was but the surplus of a particular year, and that it was like the proprietor of a hop-ground endeavouring to borrow money on the guarantee of its proceeds in a particularly favourable year. Fox, Burke, and Sheridan followed in the same strain. They argued that, supposing the assumed surplus actually to exist, which they doubted, it would immediately vanish in case of war, and a fresh mass of debt be laid on.[315] Sheridan said, the only mode of paying off a million a year would be to make a loan of a million a year, for the Minister reminded him of the person in the comedy who said, "If you won't lend me the money, how can I pay you?" On the 14th of May he moved a string of fourteen resolutions unfavourable to the report of the Committee, which he said contained facts which could not be negatived; but the House did negative them all without a division, and on the 15th of May passed the Bill. In the Lords it met with some proposals from Earl Stanhope, which were to render the violation of the Act equivalent to an act of bankruptcy, but these were negatived, and the Bill was passed there on the 26th. It was not until 1828 that the fallacy on which the Bill rested was finally exposed by Lord Grenville, who, curiously enough, had been chairman of the Committee which recommended its adoption.During this period, St. John the Evangelist, Westminster, was built by Thomas Archer. The churches of Greenwich, of St. George's, Hanover Square, and St. Luke's, Middlesex, were designed by John James. To this time likewise belong St. Giles's-in-the-Fields; St. Olave's, Southwark, and Woburn Abbey, by Flitcroft; Chatsworth House and Thoresby, by Salmon; Montagu House, by the French architect, Pouget; All Saints' Church, and the Peckwater Quadrangle of Christ Church, Oxford, by Dean Aldrich; and the library of Christ Church, designed by Dr. George Clarke, M.P. for Oxford, in the reign of Anne. After these the Earl of Burlington, a worshipper of Palladio and Inigo Jones, became a very fashionable architect, and built the dormitory at Westminster School; Petersham House, and other noblemen's mansions. The fine colonnade in the courtyard of Burlington House is also his work. Burlington was essentially a copyist, as was his protg Kent, who built Holkham, in Norfolk, and the Horse Guards, but acquired as much reputation by his landscape gardening as he gained little by his architecture. Towards the end of this period several foreign artists were employed in England. We have already named Pouget; Giacomo Leoni was much employed; and Labelye, a Swiss, built Westminster Bridge, which was completed in 1747. Thomas Ripley, originally a carpenter, built the Admiralty.
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