Wren, like his employers, the citizens of the City of London was a sound Protestant; and when he was commissioned to rebuild St. Paul’s after the Great Fire, his intention was to give London a Protestant cathedral. He was less concerned to provide processional aisles and altared chapels than a vast unencumbered central area for preaching. The new cathedral was to be a gigantic preaching-house. To provide the vast central area demanded, the narrow crossing beneath the central tower of a Gothic cathedral was abandoned. Instead of a central tower he resolved to employ a dome—the only form of roof which would cover so vast a span. One mediæval cathedral in England, and one only, had such a crossing. It was the superb cathedral of Ely, where Wren’s uncle was Bishop. But it was no doubt of St. Peter’s, Rome, that Wren was thinking, rather than of Ely. Just as St. Peter’s, Rome, had been built to rival and surpass the Florence Duomo, so Wren designed that his own new cathedral should be an improvement on St. Peter’s, Rome. In the supports of his dome he chose to follow the unhappy precedents of Florence and Ely rather than the nobler type of St. Peter’s and Santa Sophia; he blocked up his central area with eight piers, instead of poising his dome on four supports, as in the metropolitan cathedrals of the East and West. [Illustration: AS FIRST PROJECTED.] In Wren’s favourite design, as shown in the model still preserved in the cathedral, the dome was to be abutted to the west by an aisleless vestibule or nave, itself crowned by a minor dome; while to the north, east, and south, it was intended to give it the support of a surrounding ring of domical chapels, opening into the central area by a series of fairy-like vistas and ever-changing contrasts of light and shadow. But the Anglican clergy rose in revolt at the position assigned to them in the cathedral—a position contrary to any precedent of the Anglican Church; and refused to sit in a ring all round the central area beneath the dome. On the other hand, the Court party, almost openly expecting, and with good reason, the restoration of the old religion, wanted an aisled nave with room for the pageantry of processions and with provision of chapels for the saint-worship soon to be restored. Romanisers and Anglicans alike united to condemn a plan which failed to provide for the ritualistic needs of either. Wren had to start again; and London had to put up with a Renaissance cathedral which in plan is as mediæval as that of Ely, with aisled nave, aisled choir, aisled transepts, and even with a western transept, as again at Ely. St. Paul’s then, is primarily, an aisled (_i.e._ a basilican) church, with, incidentally, a dome thrown in. And therein lies the fault of the design. Internally, the church predominates over the dome. Unless you stand beneath or almost beneath the dome, you can hardly see that a dome is there at all. Narrow nave,