In the two centuries that have elapsed since his death Wren has been admired and followed from very different points of view. It has been justly said that he has been in fashion and out of fashion and is now above fashion. Any doubt as to the reality and massive quality of his genius can easily be dissipated by a consideration of what imitators have done. No domed church on the lines of St. Paul’s has achieved equal beauty and grandeur, nor have any of the innumerable steeples, based on his inventions, been of the same rank. In domestic buildings, his special character remains pre-eminent and informs the best work of to-day--a certain graciousness that in others degenerated often into heaviness. There is a vast gap between Wren at Hampton Court and Talman at Chatsworth. Thus it is that in this Bicentenary Year there is the same feeling that caused Sir John Vanbrugh to refuse the succession to his office “out of tenderness for Sir Christopher Wren,” and that led the _Spectator_ to publish a noble tribute repudiating the ingratitude of his dismissal. The lovers of architecture everywhere will feel that in honouring Wren they have honoured the Art to which a man of such amazing gifts and nobility of character was content to devote the flower of his life. Sir Christopher Wren was the very fulfilment of Wotton’s prophecy--“Architecture can want no commendation, where there are Noble Men or Noble mindes.” APPENDIX I A NOTE IN AMPLIFICATION OF THE REFERENCE IN CHAPTER IV. TO PASCAL’S PROBLEM Mathematicians who wished to answer Pascal’s challenge were given until October 1, 1658, for a solution, and an umpire, M. de Cavarci, was nominated, and the prizes were 40 doubloons or pistoles and for the second, 20. In a letter of October 10 Pascal says he has received both attempts at solutions of the problems set and also a number of discussions of matters connected with the cycloid which did not pretend to be solutions of his problem: “Mais entre tous les écrits qu’on a recues de cette sorte, il n’y a rien de plus beau que ce qui a été envoyé par M. Wren; car outre la belle manière qu’il donne de mesurer le plan de la roulette (=cycloid), il a donné la comparaison de la ligne courbe même et ses parties, avec la ligne droit: sa proposition est que la ligne de la roulette est quadruple de son axe, dont il a envoyé l’énonciation sans démonstration. Et comme il est le premier qui l’a produite, c’est sans doute a lui que l’honneur de la première invention en appartient.” Summing up his history of the cycloid, he concluded that the first to remark that curve in nature was P. Mersenne, that M. de Roberval first worked out some of its properties, “que le premier qui en a mesuré la ligne courbe a été M. Wren.”