Christopher Wren had not let the ashes cool under his feet. Evelyn was picking his way among the debris—“the ground ... so hot that it even burnt the soles of my shoes”—and mourning over the ninety burnt City Churches, and the ruins of St. Paul’s, “one of the most antient pieces of piety in the Christian World.” He was thinking of the “poore Bookesellers,” who, having trusted all their “noble impressions” to the insides of the Churches, had “ben indeede ill-treated by Vulcan.” Two hundred thousand pounds’ worth of books had been burnt: “an extraordinary detriment,” says Evelyn, “to the whole Republiq of Learning.”[310] Pepys, after the grimy fatigues of the past few days, had been “trimmed,” and had gone to Church, in his Sunday best, and listened to a bad, poor sermon by the Dean of Rochester: “nor eloquent, in saying at this time that the City is reduced from a large folio to a decimo-tertio”:—the Dean, too, must have been among the booksellers. Lady Ranelagh was dispensing Robert Boyle’s charity among the houseless Londoners huddled in the fields; and Henry Oldenburg was writing to Robert Boyle in Oxford. “The Stationers of Paul’s,” he wrote, “had suffered greatly.” All their books, carried by them into St. Faith’s Church, under St. Paul’s, had been burnt; and amongst them were the “hitherto printed Transactions.” “Dr. Wren,” he continued, “has, since my last, drawn a model for a New City, and presented it to the King, who produced it himself before the Council, and manifested much approbation of it. I was yesterday morning with the Doctor, and saw the model, which methinks does so well provide for security, conveniency, and beauty, that I can see nothing wanting as to those three main articles; but whether it has consulted with the populousness of a great City, and whether reason of state would have that consulted with, is a query to me. I then told the Doctor that, if I had had an opportunity to speak with him sooner, I should have suggested to him that such a model, contrived by him and received and approved by the Royal Society or a Committee thereof, before it had come to the view of his Majesty, would have given Our Society a name, and made it popular, and availed not a little to silence those who ask continually, what have they done?” Wren explained to Oldenburg that he had been obliged to act quickly, “before other designs came in.” And Oldenburg, in his letter to Boyle, took comfort in remembering that, after all, “it was a Member that had done it,” and that, when Wren’s design was accepted—as it undoubtedly would be—all the world would know that the model of a New London was the work of a Member of the Royal Society.[311]