woods—ivory, pearls, marbles, metals, precious stones all being requisitioned.

During the reigns of William and Mary, Anne, and George the First, events of great importance transpired. St. Paul's, that great monument to Wren and Renaissance architecture, was opened; the Marlborough wars were fought; the South Sea Bubble was blown and burst; Sir Christopher Wren and Grinling Gibbon completed their work; Marlborough House and Blenheim were built; Addison, Pope, and Daniel Defoe were at work; Gibraltar was taken; England and Scotland were united; the Bank of England was incorporated; and last, but not least, the National Debt started.

CHAPTER II: SIR CHRISTOPHER WREN AND GRINLING GIBBON

The temper of a nation is reflected in its architecture and, in a lesser degree, in its furniture. When we look at the furniture of the last of the Stuarts, Mary II. and her sister Anne, we see written all over it in large letters one great virtue—sobriety.

In the oak furniture of the last of the Tudors and the first of the Stuarts (Elizabeth and James I.) we find the same sober note; but in the main it is more essentially English. In the Augustan era of Elizabeth we certainly see in the more pretentious examples of Court-cupboards and cabinets the influence of the Renaissance; but the furniture made by the people for the people is simply English in form and decoration.

During the troublous times of the two Charles and to the end of the revolution which placed William and Mary on the throne, the country was alternately in the throes of gaiety and Puritanism; and a dispassionate view leads one to suppose that "Merrie England" had the greater leaning towards merriment. The people of England knew well enough that sobriety was good for them, and Cromwell gave it in an unpalatable form. The remedy was less to the country's liking than the disease, and with the Restoration in 1660 the passions of the nation ran riot in the opposite extreme.

The final lesson came with the twenty-nine years of misrule under Charles II. and James II. Having drained the cup of degradation to the dregs, the country set about her real reformation by the aid of Dutch William, himself the grandson of a Stuart, and his cousin-consort Anne, the daughter of the self-deposed James.

James II. had learnt his lesson from the errors of his brother Charles, but was not wise enough to fully profit by it. He realised that misrule had stretched his subjects' patience to the breaking-point, and during his short reign there was a certain amount of surface calm. But beneath was the continual struggle for absolutism on the part of the monarch and emancipation on the part of the people. The subject is familiar to students of history.

With the advent of the Orange règime we find a distinct revolution in English furniture. There is no evidence of a sudden change. We find comparatively severe examples during James II.'s reign and flamboyant patterns dating from the days of William. The transitional period was shorter than usual, and once the tide had gathered strength in its flow there was very little ebb.

The Civil troubles in the country had given a severe check to the arts: the influence of the Renaissance upon furniture was upon the wane, and the ground was lying fallow and hungry for the new styles which may be said to have landed with William of Orange in Torbay in 1688.

The main influence in the furniture was Dutch, and the Dutch had been to a large extent influenced by a wave of Orientalism.

Twenty-five years before this, England's most renowned, if not greatest, architect had designed his first ecclesiastical building—the Chapel of Pembroke Hall, Cambridge—in the classical style which he made famous in England.

Christopher Wren was born in 1631 or 1632. He was son of Dr. Christopher Wren, Dean of Windsor, and nephew of Matthew Wren, Bishop of Ely, who, to celebrate his release from the Tower, built Pembroke Hall Chapel in 1663, employing his nephew as architect.

In 1664, when Christopher Wren was about thirty-two years of age, he came in contact with John Evelyn, the diarist, who in his journal, under date July 13, writes of him as that "miracle of a youth." The acquaintanceship ripened into a friendship, only broken by Evelyn's death in 1706. From Evelyn's diary we are able to glean many things concerning the then rising young architect. The idea of the Royal Society was the outcome of a meeting in 1660 of several scientists in Wren's room after one of the lectures at Gresham College. On being approached on the desirability of forming the Society, Charles II. gave his assent and encouragement to the project, and we learn that one of the first transactions of the Society was an account of Wren's pendulum experiment. The Society was incorporated by Royal Charter in 1663.

It would appear that Wren had no world-wide reputation as an architect at the time, but, probably through the instrumentality of his friend Evelyn, he was appointed by the King as assistant to Sir John Denham, the Surveyor-General of Works, and in the opinion of one of his biographers, Lucy Phillimore, "the practical experience learned in the details of the assistant-surveyor's work was afterwards very serviceable to him."

We find him occupied in 1664 in plans for repairing old St. Paul's and in building the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford, which was finished in 1669. During the plague of 1665 Wren made a tour of the Continent, and there absorbed ideas which fructified in the new style of classical architecture which has made his name famous. During further discussions concerning the much-needed repairs to St. Paul's came the fire of London in 1666. This solved the difficulty, for St. Paul's was left a gaunt skeleton in the City of Desolation. Wren's plans for the rebuilding of the City were accepted by the King, but were never carried out in anything like their entirety. All attempts to patch up the cathedral were abandoned in 1673, and the ground was cleared for the new foundations. The architect and his master mason laid the first stone on June 21, 1675. The cathedral and the story of its building is familiar to us all. The great architect, having drawn the circle for the dome, called to a workman to bring him a piece of stone to mark the centre. The man brought a fragment of an old tombstone on which was the single word "Resurgam." All present took it as a good omen. We all know how the last stone of the lantern was laid thirty-five years afterwards by the architect's own son in the presence of his father. During those thirty-five years the great freemason's hands had been full, and in the City which rose from the ashes of the fire of 1666 no less than fifty-four churches were either built or restored by him. In addition, we find that the rebuilding or restoration of thirty-six halls of the City guilds, as well as upwards of fifty notable buildings—hospitals, colleges, palaces, cathedrals and churches—in London and the provinces, is laid to his credit.

St. Paul's Cathedral, Wren's City churches, and the Monument, would in themselves make London famous amongst the cities of the world. The Monument was erected to commemorate the rebuilding of the City. The inscription thereon absurdly attributes the origin of the fire to the Papists. Pope satirises it in his "Moral Essays":

Chief, for beauty, amongst the