ARCHITECTURAL WORKS OF SIR C. WREN. 369 channel of intelligence*, and it may savour of temerity to persist in this objective criticism on the proudest of our national monuments. Still it appears not wholly without foundation. In nature or art, in the climate, in the celestial aspects of the metropolitan cathedral, its sital position and the allocation of inhabitants around it, there seems no cause to warrant the existing disparities of execution. Why, then, should the architect have lavished the resources of his genius in rendering superb the west entrance, and then from that point, on both sides, admitted a progressive declension in beauty and elaborateness till it terminates in the dead and meaningless abutment of the east? Surely if ornamentations were august and impressive on the west exterior, they were equally so, and equally needed, on the north, south, and the east. In the erection of a private mansion or street-shop, outhouses with other conveniences may be best thrown into the shade, and the distinction of front and back is allowable; but in a temple that ought to be equally elaborated throughout, a perfect chrysolite in every part, no such fitness of utilities can be pleaded. In extenuation of Wren's failure, if such it be, it ought to be added, that he submitted several designs. for the reconstruction of St. Paul's, and that which he preferred was not adopted; and in carrying out the one selected he was much interfered with, especially by the Duke of York, who sought to adapt the new edifice to the Roman worship he purposed to revive. From laying the first stone to completion, St. Paul's occupied thirty-five years; it was opened for service in 1697, but not finished till 1710. Besides the cathedral, Sir C. Wren saw the completion of fifty-one churches in *Spectator, Dec. 1. 1849. BB the city from his designs, the Monument of London, several halls of the city companies, Chelsea Hospital, Marlborough House, and the College of Physicians. In the erection of noble mansions Sir John Vanbrugh attained celebrity, and of which Blenheim House, Castle Howard, and Seaton Delaval are examples. In concluding our present summary of progress in art and literature during the reign of Anne, and occasionally in preceding divisional periods, it may be proper to remark that some of the most distinguished leaders of their age have, for an almost obvious reason, been passed over with little more than incidental reference to their names. It would, for instance, have been an idle, if not presumptuous task, to have attempted any new commentary on Shakspeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Swift, Daniel Defoe, or other similarly established celebrity. These, with the great luminaries of science, Bacon, Hobbes, Newton, and Locke, form, in intellectual culture, creative powers, and advancement, the national gods, with the worship and knowledge of whom almost every one has been made familiar from infancy, and to whose undying renown it would have been hardly possible to add anything not either trite, too curt, or superfluous. Omission, therefore, altogether seemed to me, with some exceptions, preferable to any attempt at an unworthy offering or inadequate appreciation. They are the fixed stars of the firmament of mind and letters, and, like the celestial bodies themselves, continue to shed their rays of glory on the present, as they will probably do on every future generation. CHAPTER XIX. REIGN OF GEORGE I. Accession of the Brunswick Family.—Character of George I.-Triumph of the Whigs, and their vindictive Prosecution of the late Ministry.-Exile of Lord Bolingbroke and his Return to England. Septennial Act and Peerage Bill. - National Prosperity; Mississippi and By the watchful energy of the Whigs at the close of the last reign, Protestantism and Constitutionalism were preserved, and the national guarantees secured by the Revolution not suffered to lapse in the transfer of the crown to the electoral House of Hanover. In the parliamentary settlement of the crown, it was the religious element that had prevailed; and George I. succeeded as the nearest Protestant heir of the abdicated family, but with fiftyseven persons of the Stuart blood between him and the throne, with superior hereditary claims. He was the eldest son of Ernest Augustus, Elector of Hanover, by Sophia, the youngest of twelve children of the titular Queen of Bohemia, Elizabeth, only daughter of James I. of England. Of the new king's father little is known save that he was a hardy, stirring man, who expired in 1698; but the king's mother, the Electress Sophia, was eminently endowed, refined in manners, beautiful in person, and well versed in literature and science. She lived to the age of eighty-four, dying in 1714, and at seventyfive was little impaired by age, and is hetn described by Bishop Burnet as being the "most knowing and entertaining woman of the age." Her son inherited few of the accomplishments of the electress; he partook more of the qualities of his father, and brought with him the impressions left by his early life in camps and garrisons. On his accession to the English throne, George I. was in his fifty-fifth year; a good-natured prince, Horace Walpole admits, and wise enough to submit to the constitutional regimen he found established. He left the government of the kingdom to his ministers. He was simple in his tastes as in his personal aspect; German in his habits and attachments, even to that of his mistresses. Hanover he considered his home; in England he was a stranger, neither acquainted with its language, manners, nor constitution; nor did he ever care to become so. Shy and reserved in public, but easy and facetious among his intimates, during the fourteen years of the government of his electoral dominions he had acquired the reputation of a just and circumspect prince, who well understood his own interests and steadily pursued them. Punctual in business, he was more dull than indolent; and the plain honesty of his nature, joined with the narrow notions of a low education, made him look upon his acceptance of the crown as an act of injustice towards his half-cousin the Pretender. He had no taste for literature or the arts; was amorous, fond of punch, and parsimonious. Avarice was so predominant in him that he would raise no troops to secure the succession; and the principal Whigs were obliged from their own purses to advance the sum necessary to gain some ignoble men of rank, whom nothing else would induce to join them. With these dispositions, * Lord John Russell's Memoirs of the Affairs of Europe, vol. i. p. 301. STATE OF PARTIES. 373 the king naturally, if not necessarily, became passive in public affairs, beyond a kind of convivial superintendence, exercised with his chief minister over the sovereign's favourite beverage, in the only language common to both.* Six weeks elapsed between the death of Anne and the arrival in England of her successor. In the interim the government was invested in the Regency, agreeably with the Act of 1705, composed of seven great officers of state, together with nineteen peers named by the elector, most of whom were Whigs. It was this party that had kept open the king's way to the throne, and by them he purposed exclusively to govern, and not by a balanced or unequally mixed administration. During the reign of William III. and the greater part of that of Anne the state offices had been divided between the members of the two parties, with a view to conciliate both and inhibit the leaders from acquiring too absolute control over the sovereign. In the middle of the reign of Anne the Whigs obtained something like exclusive power; and towards the end of her reign the Tories acquired unchecked authority; but their hostile intrigues and misconduct withheld from them the confidence of George I., and the Whigs became strong enough to keep out their opponents for nearly half a century. The Jacobites, or par Horace Walpole says of his father, Sir Robert, that he governed George I. in Latin, the king not speaking English, and his minister no German, nor even French. (Reminiscences.) The Tory leader, William Shippen, sarcastically observed, that it “was the only infelicity of his Majesty's reign that he was unacquainted with the English language and the English constitution." This gave great offence to the Court, and "honest" Shippen, as he was termed, refusing to soften the expression, it led to his being sent to the Tower. |
