I bring this slight catalogue of Wren’s miscellaneous works to a close with a return to Oxford. It is difficult to determine how far he was responsible for the Library at Queen’s College (1693) because Hawksmoor was mixed up with him there, but the whole College must be regarded as a Wren building. There is nothing of Hawksmoor’s more faithful to his old master’s ideas, and less influenced by Sir John Vanbrugh’s, the two poles between which the lesser man was always oscillating. Sir Reginald Blomfield is strongly against attributing the Ashmolean to Wren, but it is difficult to believe that such a building at such a time could have been entrusted to anyone else. Similarly Trinity College Chapel (1694) is somewhat of a mystery. It has been said that Dean Aldrich was the architect and that Wren was only called in to advise. The quality of the design suggests that Wren was the senior partner in the combination. There is no confusion with regard to Tom Tower. Dr. Fell, Dean of Christ Church, commissioned him to build a tower over Wolsey’s gateway. The result is something certainly not Tudor, but quite certainly a picturesque composition of a high order. Wren’s detail is little like that of the sixteenth century below it, but he did the one thing needful: he provided a dignified and picturesque portal for the College, and it is folly to rebuke a late seventeenth-century architect for not entering into the spirit of his predecessors of the early sixteenth. The study of the spirit of Gothic work, alike systematic and sympathetic, is a growth of less than a hundred years. Wren was of his age. CHAPTER XI WREN AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES: LAST YEARS The appreciation a man may win in his own day and generation is no sure guide to his quality as an artist, as witness the cases of Mr. Martin Tupper and many Past Presidents of the Royal Academy; but when the chorus of praise persists during something like eighty years and comes from men in every walk of life, it is at least evidence of notable character. Such praise was Wren’s in a marked degree, and it helps to explain the way he held his own under the fickle King Charles, the cantankerous King William, and the casual Queen Anne. Under King George I., when Wren was a very old man, he lost his appointment, but only as the culmination of a discreditable campaign against him by futile people who lacked the wit to appreciate the greatness of the man against whom they plotted their dishonest little persecutions.