It was Wren’s quality of common sense as much as the genius of the artist that made his City churches what they are, practical solutions of practical difficulties and instinct with the English spirit of compromise, but none the less the greatest group of churches created in any country by the genius and practical wisdom of one man. CHAPTER IX CHELSEA, HAMPTON COURT, AND GREENWICH Mr. Basil Champneys has recorded a notable observation by Thomas Carlyle on Chelsea Hospital: “I had passed it, almost daily, for many years without thinking much about it, and one day I began to reflect that it had always been a pleasure to me to see it, and I looked at it more attentively, and saw that it was quiet and dignified and _the work of a gentleman_.” This was evidently a favourite theme with Carlyle, for William Allingham’s Diary for June 25, 1874, records a similar phrase with the addition that the Hospital was “admirably adapted for its uses.” Carlyle’s devotion to Wren’s memory had an odd repercussion. When William De Morgan called on the Sage to beg him on behalf of William Morris to join the Anti-Scrape Society, Carlyle was cold at first, but a reference to the dealings of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners with Wren’s churches set him alight. He ended a panegyric on Wren with “he was a very great man, of extraordinary patience with fools,” and glared round at the company reproachfully. Morris rather winced when Carlyle, in a letter accepting membership of the Anti-Scrape, referred to the City churches as “marvellous works, the like of which we shall never see again,” and his hatred of the Renaissance never ceased to blind him to Wren’s genius. It would have been well if the Society had been more active, in the past, in defence of Wren’s churches. The narrow mediævalism of the latter half of the nineteenth century wrought havoc even where it failed to destroy. Stained glass and other alien trappings have prejudiced far too many of his fine interiors. One church architect of the type responsible for these things was finely reproved with the reminder that Wren was just as good a High Churchman as he was. [Illustration: PLATE IX CHELSEA HOSPITAL: THE MAIN PORTICO.]