Perhaps the greatest representative the borough ever had was Sir Christopher Wren. It was in May, 1685, that this distinguished architect was elected Member of Parliament for Plympton. How this came to pass, and which of the two great parties he represented, we are not precisely informed, but may easily conjecture, as Plympton was always a Tory borough. No doubt he occasionally thought, though he might not say, with Mercutio, “A plague on both your houses,” for men of science and artists—and he was in a high degree an artist—are seldom very ardent politicians. Still, we know he was a staunch Royalist and Churchman. His father was Dean of Windsor; his uncle, the Bishop of Ely, had been imprisoned in the Tower for nearly twenty years during the Commonwealth; he himself was a Fellow of All Souls’, Oxford, and held a professorship at that University, at an extremely orthodox period. There are other reasons for supposing that he stuck pretty close to the court and government of the day. His father being Dean, and Sir Christopher himself having only the year before been appointed Comptroller of the Works at Windsor, we may readily imagine that he came down to the independent electors of Plympton with a rather strong recommendation from the Dean and Chapter, who were, as they are still, the patrons of the living in this borough. And when he came (always supposing that he did come, and that he did not merely send his respects from London), he was, no doubt, well entertained by the gentlemen of his party in the town, and lustily cheered by the agricultural non-electors, who always exhibited a great deal of enthusiasm under the stimulating influence of an election, and were never heard again to express their sentiments until the next parliament brought down a new member for the eyes of all Plympton—not to say “all Europe”—to gaze upon. Many of the inhabitants, however, who were acquainted with Sir Christopher’s fame, may be supposed to have regarded their representative with admiration and pride. Just nineteen years before, the terrible Fire had devastated the metropolis, and now London was rising like a phœnix from the ashes by his magic wand. Exactly ten years before he had himself laid the foundation stone of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and now the first stage of that great work had been just completed, the choir and its side aisles, and critics, who remembered old St. Paul’s in its Gothic glory, and had seen Inigo Jones defacing and tinkering the venerable fane with his Palladian porticoes and urns, were flocking to the churchyard. The new structure was already too grand and unique not to be commended; but there was yet a quarter of a century’s laborious and incessant work before the top stone could be raised, and the gilded cross could crown the noble dome. The same architect, the same master-builder, and the same bishop, who witnessed the beginning of the great work in 1675, saw its close in 1710.