The King approved the plan, as well he might, and then the trouble began. Wren worked out a scheme whereby the freeholders of the City were to surrender their properties temporarily to Commissioners. Their areas and frontages were to be noted, and new sites given to them on the new alinement of streets with equal advantages as to area and frontage, and, needless to say, vastly greater advantages in amenity and ultimate value. No proprietor would have been seated exactly on his own site, but none at any considerable distance from it, and the intelligent grouping of trades would have been of advantage to everyone. But the individualism of the Londoner overbore every advantage that Wren offered him. He was content to lose the chance of being citizen of the most convenient if not the most magnificent City the world had seen, and incidentally of benefiting his pocket enormously, if only he could build again on the odd-shaped sites that he had inherited from his forefathers. But we must not blame the seventeenth-century Londoner too much. Wren was an honest man, but the citizens might well be suspicious lest his town-planning schemes developed into a typical piece of Caroline jobbery. There was the little affair of a vast sum of money voted for a noble monument to Charles the First. Wren designed it, as bidden, and the money was forthcoming, but the monument remained on paper, to the benefit of Charles the Second’s pocket. Wren was an apostle of town-planning born out of due time, and his vision faded. We are constrained as the years go by to spend millions in re-creating small scraps of his scheme in the name of street improvements. [Illustration: S^T MARTIN’S & S^T PAUL’S] But the labour he gave to his great plan was not all wasted. He perceived that the Cathedral and the parish churches were architecturally the keys of the situation, and when he came to the rebuilding of both he saw London as a City marked by its churches. Foiled in his attempt to set them as elements in long vistas of noble streets of uniform houses, he at least could determine that they should give a beautiful skyline, and that the parish churches should be grouped justly in relation to the great bulk of the domed Cathedral. The picture of London from the Thames which Canaletto drew in 1767 shows what we have lost with the destruction of so many of Wren’s towers and spires and the blotting out of many others by the hideous incubus of Cannon Street Station and rows of ten-storied warehouses. Wren travelled much by the highway we neglect, in a boat on the Thames, and he must have thought much of the skyline as he passed from Hampton Court to St. Paul’s, and watched the City growing under his hand.