of its being such a genuine expression of the age
to which it belongs, and of his mind who built
it, this church is, in its character of a work of
art, a high and magnificent achievement. It is
fine from all points of view. If you get a mere
glimpse of it between the houses of some narrow
neighbouring lane, it is a fine and suggestive
glimpse. It you see it from a distance, so huge
and telling a structure is it, that the vast extent
of London is still gathered and held together by
it as completely as a village by its rustic church.
London, with all its increase, does not outgrow
that, nor ever will. There is no other thing that
could have had this effect but a cupola. There
is nothing else, no spire, no tower, however great,
that could so hold our town together. The
dome seems to have been invented with a
prophetic eye to great towns and their exigencies,
and for ours even more than others. There are
no nooks and crannies in that vast smooth surface
to become choked and disfigured with dirt
and soot. It is not a jot the worse for all the
incense which all the chimneys since the time of
Wren have offered at its shrine, and are still flinging
up every day from their foul and grimy censers.
Indeed, the style of the whole building is in its
large and even masses, and the great blocks of
masonry by which it makes its effect singularly
calculated to set our London smoke at defiance.

Nor is there in this noble church anything—
as has been alleged by some—that savours of
the Pagan temple rather than the Christian
cathedral. The great vital reality that religion
is in this country is by no means inaptly
represented by this simple and undisguiseful pile.
This church is Christian, but it is not Catholic
in its look. There are about it no furtive and
secretive corners, no contrivances and intricacies
that fear the light. It shows candid arid open
in the daylight, like the creed it represents, and
gives to our sight everything which it has,
because it has nothing to conceal.

But with this feeling of admiration which we
surely all experience for St. Paul's Cathedral, is
there any one who wishes that such a church
should be reproduced? Surely not. When,
caught by the notion of the cupola, we have in
more recent days introduced it for the sake of
introducing it, we have not prospered over well, as
those will think who give themselves the trouble
to spend a half-dozen of minutes in front of the
National Gallery or to the London University.

But are we not travelling a little fast in
descending suddenly from St. Paul's Cathedral to
these modern structures? Curiously enough,
there is little to detain us in the chronological
history of the London Buildings between these
two periods. Beyond such edifices as the
Foundling Hospital— which is not beautiful—a
few churches and some rebuildings and additions
made here and there, there is not much to hold
us on our way to more modern times and the
architectural glories of our own—in this respect
—most favoured age. There are, however, one
or two things in connexion with this intermediate
period which it is necessary to mention.

The classic rage, which it will be remembered
struck us in examining the statues belonging to
a certain phase of metropolitan decoration, is
not unrepresented in the buildings of the time,
and is in few things more conspicuous than in
the prevailing fondness for urns, which seems
to have existed in men's minds. In the decoration
of Somerset House, which is a good specimen
of the pompous style, these urns are in
combination with trumpeting angels and other
vile statuary, the chief resources in a decorative
way at the architect's command. The urns are,
indeed, to the buildings, what the truncheon was
to the statues, of that age, and are in every way
as satisfactory and as interesting. Just Heaven!
what an invigorating thing it would be to be
able to plough down into the depths of a man's
mind profoundly enough to ascertain the exact
object which he has in view when he surmounts
the edifice in course of construction with a row
of urns! At Somerset House, on the "new"
church in the Strand; and (in more modern
instances) on the parapet of the Treasury and of
Buckingham Palace, the frequent urn is present
to suggest the cup which cheers but not
inebriates. What is the fiction of these urns? and
what are they supposed to hold? Their very
figure accuses a hollow inside: how is that hollow
filled? Is any elucidation of the difficulty
provided by the fact that the appearance of this
beautiful and intelligent ornament is nearly
coeval with the first introduction of tea into this
country? It maybe so. It maybe that the
national mind, elated with the joy of this new
discovery, could hear of nothing but tea and its
emblems, and that even the architects of the day
were obliged to yield to the popular feeling on
the subject. But why are these vessels incomplete,
and destitute, to an urn, of spout? The
suppression of this indispensable part of the urn
is to be deplored, not only because in itself it is
ruinous to the urn, as an urn, to be without a
spout, but because it has led to the introduction
of much foreign matter in connexion with these
vases which is inconsistent and anomalous to
their nature. Let any man proceed to the Treasury
buildings in Parliament-street, and if he has
good eyes, he will see that the long and desperate
licence allowed to our architects in their
permission to suppress the spouts of their tea-urns
has borne terrible fruit in these modern times;
the liberty to tamper with his subject having
induced the designer of the Treasury urns to
represent each of them emitting from its cover,
not a cloud of steam, as might have been
expected, but a FIR-CONE, which, having had the
luck to grow out of a tea-urn, proves itself
worthy of its wonderful origin, and in its turn
gives birth, out of its very entrails, to a small
and pointed obelisk.

Tea-urns, trumpeting angels, and all things
else considered, it must be owned that Somerset
House (especially as seen from the river) is a
fine and imposing edifice, and a good representative
of the order of architecture which we
have ventured to call the Ostentatious.

When things come to the worst, they are