It is possible, for example, that the present trouble at St. Paul’s Cathedral would have been avoided if Wren, whose whole admiration was for the Roman manner of building, had gone to Rome to see what, in fact, Roman building was. He would then have learnt that Roman builders did not carry immense weights on piers which consisted, as at St. Paul’s, of a core of rubble cased in by finely jointed ashlar. He would have found that it was advisable to build them either of ashlar throughout, or, if he had decided on a rubble core with an ashlar casing, to interrupt the rubble core at reasonable intervals by courses of hard tiles or bricks. These would have prevented the perpendicular settlement of the rubble that has now disturbed the relation between the rubble and the ashlar casing. The professional Inigo Jones would not have made that mistake. The amateur Wren did. And there is little excuse for this fault. In his Report on St. Paul’s, written before the Fire, Wren is very contemptuous of his Gothic predecessor: “The work was both ill design’d and ill built from the Beginning: ill design’d, because the Architect gave not Butment enough to counterpoise and resist the weight of the Roof from spreading the Walls; for the Eye alone will discover to any man that those Pillars, as vast as they are, even eleven Foot diameter, are bent outwards at least six inches from their first position. This bending of the Pillars was facilitated by their _ill Building, for they are only cased without, and that with small stones, not one greater than a Man’s Burden; but within it is nothing but a Core of small Rubbish-stone, and much mortar_, which easily crushes and yields to the weight.” When the time came for Wren to build the piers that carry his dome, he fell into exactly the same blunder. He was similarly defeated sometimes by problems of design for lack of knowledge of the history of his art, and by too great a reliance on his own invention. In trying at St. Paul’s to marry the idea of a great central dome to the Gothic cruciform plan with a determination to preserve the long vista down the aisles, he involved himself in difficulties in the support of the dome which he could not safely overcome without clumsy elements of design, to be discussed later. [Illustration: PLATE XVI WREN MEDAL AT WADHAM COLLEGE. Cast and chased about 1783 by G. D. Gaale.]