The old heirloom copy of the 'Parentalia' intrusted to the writer of these pages contains a large additional number of prints and wood engravings by Virtue, Vandergucht, Loggan, and others, some printed accounts of the City Churches, and several letters, rough drafts of treatises, Garter records, and other MSS. in the handwritings of the Bishop, the Dean, Sir Christopher himself, and of some of their correspondents. Among the curious omissions of the 'Parentalia' are the maiden name of Bishop Wren's wife, the date of the death of Sir Christopher's mother, Mrs. Mary Wren, and the places and the dates at which either of Sir Christopher's two weddings took place. Some of these and other gaps I have, by the aid of 'Notes and Queries,' been able to supply. Wren's son and grandson are both alike silent on all political matters subsequent to the Restoration. The Popish Plot, the Trial of the Seven Bishops, King James's Abdication, the Landing of William of Orange are all passed by in perfect silence. The traditional politics of the Wrens were certainly those of the loyal Cavalier party, and they were in favour at the Court of the Stuarts. It is curious how all political colouring disappears from the record after the period of the Restoration. Yet Sir Christopher, his cousins, and the very Mr. Wren who writes the book were all in Parliament, and that in more or less critical times. Such accidental hints as there are point, I think, to Sir Christopher as adhering, though very quietly, to the politics of his ancestors; and assuredly neither he nor his descendants had any cause to love the house of Hanover! Wren was a steady Churchman, bred up in that school of Andrewes, of Laud, and of Matthew Wren, which, if it was anti-Puritan, was equally and emphatically anti-Roman. For this reason, if for no other, after the trial of the Seven Bishops had shaken the confidence of every Churchman in the country, Wren may have acquiesced in a settlement which appeared to promise protection to the Church without finally excluding the Stuart line. The 'Parentalia,' published five years after the last Jacobite rising in 1745, preserves, as has been said, a political silence which may be that of discretion or of disappointment. One word should be said as to Gresham College, where Wren held his first professorship. It was founded in 1579 by the will of Queen Elizabeth's great merchant Sir Thomas Gresham. The college was no other than his own house in Bishopsgate, forming a quadrangle round a large garden. The seven professors, each of whom gave a lecture a day in term time, had a salary of 50_l._ a year and were lodged in the house. Gresham College escaped the Fire, and gave lodgings at that time to the Lord Mayor and the aldermen, who had been less fortunate. In 1768 it was pulled down by Act of Parliament, to give a site to the new Excise Office, and the original collegiate scheme was destroyed, though the lectures are still given in a lecture hall.