CHAPTER IV.

ST. PAUL'S AND ITS SURROUNDINGS.

WCathedral occupies the platform on the top of the

E have now arrived where, black and grand, St. Paul's

hill. Sublimely grandiose in its general outlines, it has a peculiar sooty dignity all its own, which, externally, raises it immeasurably above the fresh modern-looking St. Peter's at Rome. As G. A. Sala says, in one of his capital papers, it is really the better 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." Here and there only is the original grey of the stone seen through the overlying blackness, which in early spring is intensified by the green grass and trees of the churchyard which surrounds the eastern part of the building. When you are near it, the mighty dome is lost, but you have always an inward all-pervading impression of its existence, as you have seen it a thousand times rising in dark majesty over the city; or as, lighted up by the sun, it is sometimes visible from the river, when all minor objects are obliterated in mist. And, apart from the dome, the noble proportions of every pillar and cornice of the great church cannot fail to strike those who linger to look at them, while even the

soot-begrimed garlands, which would be offensive were they clean, have here an indescribable stateliness.

"St. Paul's appears to me unspeakably grand and noble, and the more so from the throng and bustle continually going on around its base, without in the least disturbing the sublime repose of its great dome, and, indeed of all its massive height and breadth. Other edifices may crowd close to its foundation and people may tramp as they like about it; but still the great cathedral is as quiet and serene as if it stood in the middle of Salisbury Plain. There cannot be any thing else in its way so good in the world as just this effect of St. Paul's in the very heart and densest tumult of London. It is much better than staring white; the edifice would not be nearly so grand without this drapery of black."-Hawthorne. English Note Books.

When Sir Christopher Wren was laying the foundations. of the present cathedral, he found relics of three different ages at three successive depths beneath the site of his church -first, Saxon coffins and tombs; secondly, British graves, with the wooden and ivory pins which fastened the shrouds of those who lay in them; thirdly, Roman lamps, lacrymatories, and urns, proving the existence of a Roman cemetery on the spot.* It has never with any certainty been ascertained when the first church was built here, but, according to Bede, it was erected by Ethelbert, King of Kent, and his nephew Sebert, King of the East Angles, and was the church where Bishop Mellitus refused the sacrament to the pagan princes.

"Sebert, departing to the everlasting kingdom of Heaven, left his three sons, who were yet pagans, heirs of his temporal kingdom on earth. Immediately on their father's decease they began openly to practise idolatry (though whilst he lived they had somewhat refrained), and also gave free license to their subjects to worship idols. At a certain time these princes, seeing the Bishop (of London) administering the Sacrament to the people of the church, after the 'Parentalia" (by Wren's grandson), p. 226. K

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celebration of mass, and being puffed up with rude and barbarous folly, spake, as the common report is, thus unto him: Why dost thou not give us, also, some of that white bread which thou didst give unto our father Saba and which thou does not yet cease to give to the people in the church?' He answered, If ye will be washed in that wholesome font wherein your father was washed, ye may likewise eat of this blessed bread of which he was a partaker; but if ye condemn the lavatory of life, ye can in no wise taste the bread of life.' 'We will not,' they rejoined, enter into this font of water, for we know that we have no need to do so; but we will eat of that bread nevertheless.' And when they had been often and earnestly warned by the bishop that it could not be, and that no man could partake of this holy oblation without purification and cleansing by baptism, they at length, in the height of their rage, said to him, 'Well, if thou wilt not comply with us in the small matter we ask, thou shalt no longer abide in our province and dominions,' and straightway they expelled him, commanding that he and all his company should quit their realm.”—Bede.

St. Paul's has been burnt five times; thrice by fire from heaven. It attained its final magnificence when, in the thirteenth century, it was a vista of Gothic arches, seven hundred feet in length. At the east end was the shrine of St. Erkenwald, its fourth bishop, the son of King Offa, containing a great sapphire which had the reputation of curing diseases of the eye. In the centre of the nave was the tomb of Sir John Beauchamp, son of the great Earl of Warwick, and Constable of Dover-a tomb which was popularly known as that of Duke Humphrey (of Gloucester), really buried at St. Albans. The rest of the church was crowded with monuments. Against the south wall were the tombs of two Bishops of London, Eustace de Fauconberge, Justice of Common Pleas in the reign of John, and Henry de Wengham, Chancellor of Henry III. In St. Dunstan's Chapel was the fine tomb of Henry de Lacy, Earl of Lincoln (1310), who left his name to Lincoln's Inn. Kemp, Bishop of London, who built Paul's Cross Pulpit, also had

a chapel of his own. In the north aisle were the tombs of Ralph de Hengham, judge in the time of Edward I.; of Sir Simon Burley, tutor and guardian to Richard II. (a noble figure in armour in a tomb with Gothic arches); and, ascending to a far earlier time, of Sebba, King of the East Angles, in the seventh century; and of Ethelred the Unready (1016), son of Edgar and Elfrida, in whose grave his grandson Edward Atheling is also believed to have been buried.

The choir of St. Paul's was as entirely surrounded by important tombs as those of Canterbury and Westminster are now. On the left were the shrine of Bishop Roger Niger; the oratory of Roger de Waltham, canon in the time of Edward II.; and the magnificent tomb of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster (1399), son, father, and uncle of kings, upon which he was represented with his first wife Blanche, who died of the plague, 1369, and in which his second wife, Constance,

66 mulier super

On the right

feminas innocens et devota,"* was also buried. was the tomb of Sir Nicholas Bacon (1578), father of the Lord Chancellor Bacon; and the gorgeous monument of Sir Christopher Hatton, Lord Chancellor (1591), one of the great fashionable tombs of Elizabeth's time, which took so much room as only to allow of tablets to Sir Philip Sydney and his father-in-law, Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth's secretary, thus occasioning Stow's epigram :

"Philip and Francis have no tomb,

For great Christopher takes all the room."

In the south aisle of the choir were monuments to Dean Colet, founder of St. Paul's School, and to Dr. Donne, • Walsingham.

the poet, also Dean of St. Paul's. In the north choir aisle, behind the tomb of John of Gaunt, Vandyke was buried in 1641.*

Against the wall of old St. Paul's at the S.W. corner was the parish church of St. Gregory, which was pulled down c. 1645. It was the existence of this building which caused Fuller to describe old St. Paul's as being "truly the mother church, having one babe in her body-St. Faith's, and another in her arms-St. Gregory's." The north cloister, or "Pardon Churchyard," was surrounded by the frescoes of the Dance of Death, the "Dance of Paul's," executed for John Carpenter, town-clerk of London in the reign of Henry V. Here was the long-remembered epitaph:

"Vixi, peccavi, penitui, Naturæ cessi."

A chapel founded by Thomas-à-Becket's father, Gilbert, rose in the midst of the cloister, where he was buried with his family in a tomb which was always visited by a new Lord Mayor when he attended service in St. Paul's: it was destroyed with the cloister in 1549 by Edward, Duke of Somerset.

"Old S. Paul's must have been a magnificent building. The long perspective view of the twelve-bayed nave and twelve-bayed choir, with a splendid wheel window at the East end, must have been very striking. The Chapter House embosomed in its Cloister; the little Church of S. Gregory nestling against the breast of the tall Cathedral; the enormously lofty and majestic steeple with its graceful flying buttresses, together with the various chapels and shrines filled with precious stones, must have combined to produce a most magnificent effect; and the number of tombs and monuments of illustrious men must have given an interest to the building, perhaps even more than equal to that now felt in Westminster Abbey."-W. Longman.

• For the other tombs of St. Paul's see Weever's "Funeral Monuments."