or choir, of the cathedral, it may safely lay claim to the finest _coup d’œil_ of its kind in Christendom. Its defects are notorious, but they appear to me of minor importance; and the double portico, at the west end, so mercilessly criticised by the mere grammarians of architecture, strikes me as worthy of high commendation, as a happy license in the poetry of the art, distinguishing a Christian Church from a heathen temple. The Pantheon and Madeleine at Paris are doubtless more correct, but they look—the one as if Voltaire and Rousseau might have ordered it expressly for their Mausoleum, and the other as if Julian himself had built it in grateful remembrance of his early friends, the Parisians. I leave my readers to imagine the sort of enthusiasm with which I first sauntered about the purlieus of the cathedral, and inquired of my guide-book the actual site of the old Paul’s Cross, and strove to conjure up the images, thereto pertaining, by witness of the chronicler. Alas! how much rather would I have seen the old Paul’s, which poor Laud so munificently repaired in the ill taste of his day; and that old pulpit, in which Richard Hooker wagged his venerable head, than all this Italian and classical display of Wren’s! There is no relish of the past in it: and it has little that is truly religious in its effect on the mind. Yet as being St. Paul’s, one feels that a Greek and Roman composition would not befit any other of the apostles, so well as it does the one that was a Roman citizen, and the Doctor of the Gentiles.