wits, gallants, and disreputable characters of the time. Under the pillars of that magnificent arcade the lawyer received his clients; the business man transacted his affairs; the idle inquired after news; servants wanting employment let themselves out for hire; and the chorister boys exacted tribute of gentlemen who entered the Cathedral, during divine service, with spurs on. From the period of the Reformation to the early part of the reign of Philip and Mary, matters had been even worse; for a daily market was held in the nave, and men would lead mules, horses, and other animals from entrance to exit. "Paul's Walk" is one of the most frequent subjects of allusion in the works of the Elizabethan dramatists; and there was certainly no better place in London for an observer of manners, like Ben Jonson, to imbue himself with the humours of men. It need hardly be said that Old St. Paul's was a Gothic structure; but when it was repaired in 1633, the work was put into the hands of Inigo Jones, who was entirely a child of the Italian school. He accordingly set up a classical portico in front of the ancient Gothic church, thus producing an effect of painful incongruity, although the portico in itself appears to have been extremely fine. The circumstance, however, is to some degree excused by the design of Charles I. to build an entirely new Cathedral, of which Inigo's portico was to be the frontispiece. The Civil War put an end to this project, together with many others; and during those tumultuous days Cromwell's soldiers stabled their horses in the metropolitan church of London. The complete destruction of the building followed six years after the Restoration, when the greater part of London succumbed to a disaster which more vigorous measures might have stifled in its infancy. Another Gothic edifice would have been more in accordance with the traditions of the place; but it is fortunate that no attempt was made to revive an architectural style with which all the builders of that age were entirely out of sympathy. Wren held the Gothic forms in absolute contempt, and the towers which he added to Westminster Abbey show how miserably he failed when trying to accommodate himself to methods which he neither understood nor cared to understand. With the Renaissance he was perfectly at home; and his great work, whatever objections we may make on the score of coldness, so far as the interior is concerned, is surely characterised by a grandeur of its own, dependent not merely upon physical size, but on vastness of conception, and on that sense of towering magnificence, and almost infinite dilation, which is produced by this mountain of hewn stone, extending into curved and pillared aisles, and swelling upwards into the mimic firmament of the dome. For nearly two hundred years Sir Christopher Wren's Cathedral has been the central monument of London. Round its giant mass the waves of the great