'All London had poured forth for the spectacle, which had been publicly announced, and were looking up in wonder to the old man ... who was on that wondrous height setting the seal, as it were, to his august labours. If in that wide circle which his eye might embrace there were various objects for regret and disappointment; if, instead of beholding the various streets of the city, each converging to its centre, London had sprung up and spread in irregular labyrinths of close, dark, intricate lanes; if even his own Cathedral was crowded upon and jostled by mean and unworthy buildings; yet, on the other hand, he might survey, not the Cathedral only, but a number of stately churches which had risen at his command and taken form and dignity from his genius and skill. On one side the picturesque steeple of S. Mary-le-Bow; on the other the exquisite tower of S. Bride's, with all its graceful, gradually diminishing circles, not yet shorn of its full and finely-proportioned height. Beyond, and on all sides, if more dimly seen, yet discernible by his partial eyesight (he might even penetrate to the inimitable interior of S. Stephen's, Walbrook), church after church, as far as S. Dunstan's-in-the-East, perhaps Greenwich, may have been vaguely made out in the remote distance; and all this one man had been permitted to conceive and execute;--a man not originally destined or educated for an architect, but compelled as it were by the public necessities to assume the office, and so to fulfil it, as to stand on a level with the most consummate masters of the art in Europe, and to take his stand on an eminence which his English successors almost despair of attaining.' [_THE WORK OF ONE MAN._] There then the Cathedral stood, complete externally in its stately beauty, the work of one man, who, it has been truly said, 'had the conception of a painter as well as an architect.' View the Cathedral when and where we will, with every disadvantage of smoky atmosphere and lack of space, it yet fascinates the eye by the perfection of its lines and the majesty of the whole effect, so as to leave no power of criticising petty defects. Such was the triumphant success achieved by Wren's patient genius, but Envy will merit as its shade pursue; and a series of troubles fell upon him. There will always be a number of people who imagine that anything can be procured by money, and that for the sake of money anything and everything will be done. People of this mind considered that Sir Christopher Wren prolonged the process of building S. Paul's in order to prolong his own enjoyment of the 200_l._ a year which was the salary he had himself chosen, though it was considered utterly inadequate by the Commissioners when first the work began.