In its original state, however, old St. Paul's must have been an imposing building. Its extent at least was very great. The entire mass measured 690 feet in length, by 130 in breadth, and it was surmounted by a spire 520 feet high. The spire was of timber. It bore upon its summit not only a ball and cross, but a large gilded eagle, which served as a weathercock. But the church having been nearly burned to the ground in June, 1561, owing to the carelessness of a plumber who left a pan of coals burning near some wood-work while he went to dinner, it was hastily restored without the lofty spire; so that in Hollar's engraving, given by Dugdale, of the building as it appeared in 1656, it stands curtailed of this ornament. Only the square tower, from which the spire sprang up, remains. "The old cathedral," says Mr. Malcolm, on the authority of a note with which he was furnished by the Rev. Mr. Watts, of Sion College, "did not stand in the same direction with the new, the latter inclining rather to the south-west and north-east; and the west front of the Old Church came much farther towards Ludgate than the present."[19] It is of the Cathedral, as thus renovated, that Sir John Denham speaks in the following passage of his Cooper's Hill:-- "That sacred pile, so vast, so high, That whether it's a part of earth or sky, Uncertain seems, and may be thought a proud Aspiring mountain, or descending cloud; Paul's, the late name of such a muse whose flight Has bravely reach'd and soar'd above thy height; Now shalt thou stand, though sword, or time, or fire, Or zeal, more fierce than they, thy fall conspire, Secure, whilst thee the best of poets sings, Preserv'd from ruin by the best of kings." "The best of poets" is his brother courtier Waller, who had some time before written his verses "Upon his Majesty's repairing of St. Paul's," in which he compares King Charles, for his regeneration of the Cathedral, to Amphion and other "antique minstrels," who were said to have achieved architectural feats by the power of music, and who, he says, "Sure were Charles-like kings, Cities their lutes, and subjects' hearts their strings; On which with so divine a hand they strook, Consent of motion from their breath they took." Jones's first labour, the removal of the various foreign encumbrances that had so long oppressed and deformed the venerable edifice, Waller commemorates by a pair of references to St. Paul's history, not unhappily applied: he says the whole nation had combined with his Majesty "to grace The Gentiles' great Apostle, and deface Those state-obscuring sheds, that like a chain Seem'd to confine and fetter him again; Which the glad Saint shakes off at his command, As once the viper from his sacred hand."