cannot wholly escape the limitations of his time. But there are valid compensations. His work could not be justly representative of the age, one of the significant values of architecture, if he could entirely dissociate himself from his age. When it is remembered that Sir William Chambers can actually say in his _Civil Architecture_ (1759) that every time he passes St. Paul’s he regrets that the pilasters have no entasis--probably few know it--we can form an idea of the limitations of thought that Wren would have to encounter. Vitruvius,[F] with all his imperfections, was still enthroned, and few, if any, had yet divined the real relation of that retired military engineer to the arts of Greece and Rome. Wren had the true spirit of Bacon, and, with further travel, might have seen further through the idols of his market-place. He seems to have realised the trouble in which he had involved himself in the arches of the octagon that supports his mighty dome. Every architectural student since his day has sat and speculated as to what the solution might have or should have been. Wren left a sufficiently feeble suggestion of curtains and seated apostles, occupying the tribunes (three in each presumably), as a means of veiling the defect. But the difficulty goes deeper than that: the octagon is peculiarly troublesome to handle in terms of the Orders, as a number of failures exist to show. Wren’s work was always improving. The last, and westernmost, bay of St. Paul’s inside shows more breadth and grandeur, but the carving of the spandrels is so strange that one wonders if it can really be original. This brings us to a characteristic of Wren which probably accounts for some of his lapses of taste. It seems likely that he was not hard-hearted enough with the people who worked under him, that he was too generous, too ready to accept things on his assistants’ and craftsmen’s assurance that they were the best that could be produced. He may thus have been led into an occasional acquiescence, both in design and construction, in things which he must have well known were not really right. Confronted with every sort of difficulty, and none too well backed, he must have been desperately anxious to avoid delays. His very ingenuity, moreover, would lead him to make the most of what was available. Unfortunately in works of _eternity_--architecture aims at eternity--such compromises meet with a stern Nemesis.