he received immediately on his return to Eng-| James I. determined to rebuild the palace of land. Inigo Jones had visited Italy at a period when architecture had attained its zenith both of good and evil. Classical architecture had been revived only to be corrupted. It had scarcely been carried beyond the timid though graceful advances of Bramante and Giuliano Sangallo, when Michel Angelo arose, and aimed at originality. His favourite maxim was, "that he who follows must ever remain behind." Supported by the authority of a name so mighty, his daring innovations and affectation of novelty became too much admired and too generally followed. The dregs cast off by the workings of his colossal genius became the inheritance of his imitators; and the insane extravagance of Borromini was but a necessary consequence of Michel Angelo. But all was not corruption in the schools of Italy. In the hands of Antonio Sangallo, Perruzzi, Sanmicheli, Sansovino, Vignola, and, last and greatest, Palladio, classical architecture was reanimated in all its grace and greatness. The study of these great masters in setting up the ancients for their model was not to imitate, but to think like them. They had before them the works of their Roman predecessors, who had successfully adapted the architecture of the Greeks to their own exigencies; and in a similar spirit, and with no less success, they recast the same elements into new combinations, suggested by the civil, religious, and domestic usages of modern life. Of this school of art, and especially of that branch of it with which the name of Andrea Palladio is worthily identified, Inigo Jones became a follower in the best sense of the term-a follower, passibus equis, in the diligence with which he investigated the remains of antiquity, and the discriminating taste with which he applied the knowledge thus acquired. The introduction of the Palladian style into England was not, however, the immediate result of Inigo Jones's first studies abroad. Until the year 1612, when the death of Prince Henry deprived him of his ostensible employment, he was principally occupied upon the masques or pageants which were the amusement of the court, of which he devised the scenery, machinery, and decorations, and Ben Jonson the poetry. When differences arose between these coadjutors at a later period, "Surly Ben" satirized his former friend, whose prosperity in his worldly affairs would seem to be his principal offence, in the dramatic characters of In-and-in Medley and Lantern Leatherhead; and, coarse as these delineations are, they have their value, as they appear to have preserved to us some traces of the familiar conversation of so great a man. * On the loss of his post he again visited Italy, where he remained until the office of government surveyor was conferred upon him. In this he soon found employment worthy of his talents. See Allan Cunningham's Life of Inigo Jones, Family Library. Whitehall, and Inigo Jones produced the celebrated design which has contributed more perhaps than his existing works to exalt his name whereever true greatness in art is appreciated. Whatever might be James's own share in originating or promoting this design, his adoption of it alone ought to rescue him from the contemptuous judg ment passed upon his taste by Walpole.* The palace of Whitehall had been the established residence of the sovereign since the reign of Henry VIII., by whom it had been obtained from the see of York, and who greatly enlarged and improved it. At the present period it consisted of an immense aggregation of irregular buildings, extending from Scotland Yard on the north, to Cannon Row on the south, and east and west from the Thames to St. James's Park, on which side it reached as far as what is now the top of Downing Street. Some of its principal localities are still marked by the names of Whitehall, the Privy Garden, and the Cockpit; and portions of the structure are extant in the Treasury buildings and on the banks of the river. The intention of King James was to replace this heterogeneous mass by a regular building; and to this effect Inigo Jones produced his design, extending 874 feet on the east and west sides, and 1152 on the north and south, the interior being distributed round seven courts; and with a subject so vast he was perfectly competent to grapple. Notwithstanding the celebrity of this design, it is doubtful how far any existing representation of it is authentic. That published in Campbell's Vitruvius Britannicus is an undoubted fabrication, and that generally received as the original, and published in the meagre collection of Inigo Jones's designs by Kent, is probably a compilation from his drawings by his son-in-law and disciple, Webb; and to what extent they may have suffered in the hands of the editor is not easily determined. The existing portion of the edifice (the Banqueting House) and its corresponding compartments are by no means happily fitted into their places in this composition; and a style of detail runs through the remainder, especially a flagrant abuse of rustics, which it is impossible to attribute to Inigo Jones. But there seems no reason to impugn the general design; and, dimly as it is to be seen through the medium of an engraving obscured with errors, enough is still discernible to assure us that, had it been carried into effect, it would have been the sublimest production of modern architecture, whatever may be the claims of the palaces existing in other countries, Caserta, the Escurial, Versailles, or any other on a commensurate scale. To judge it rightly, it must be considered with reference to the single fragment which was executed, and which has happily been preserved to us unscathed by alteration;-for Jones was no portfolio architecthis beauties, like those of the great Italian masters in whose footsteps he trode, are fully developed • Anecdotes of Painting, &c. only in execution; and it is from the careful study of the profiles that his works derive those graces which are equivalent to the finer touches in music and painting, imperceptible to the vulgar taste, and unattainable by the vulgar artist. Fragment as it is, the Banqueting House alone would be a sufficient foundation for the fame of its author. Its dimensions are such as to stamp it with the character of grandeur, while the simple majesty of the general outline, the picturesque combination of the parts, the harmony of the details, and the tasteful distribution of the ornaments, place it in the highest class of art, and render it equally the admiration of the artist, who traces the mind of the author in his work, and of the uninformed spectator, who is pleased he knows not wherefore.* Its faults may be left to the animadversion of those who may be disposed to criticise it in the spirit with which Benjamin West is said to have pitied Titian! But Inigo Jones is at least entitled to be criticised reverentially, and it may be doubted whether a line could be altered without injuring the effect which it was the intention of the architect to produce. To those who may be disposed to investigate more closely the style of this great master, Lyndsay House, in Lincoln's Inn Fields, may afford an instructive lesson-not as being by any means one of his best works-but as it has had the singular fortune to be coupled at a later period with a duplicate of itself, in which its faults have been corrected and its style purified, and which resembles the original as grains resemble malt. The two buildings, as they exist side by side, forcibly illustrate the difference between genius and pedantry; between the art which is felt, and that which is only studied. Perhaps there is no critical balance in which Inigo Jones can be weighed and found wanting. The church of St. Paul, Covent Garden, was the first, and remains the most successful attempt to adapt the pure and unbroken form of an ancient temple to the purposes of a modern church; and whatever merit may attach to adaptations of this sort, requiring no mind and little ingenuity, the palm is still due to Inigo Jones. In 1633 he undertook the restoration of St. Paul's Cathedral, which appears to have been suffering under the vicissitudes and dilapidations of four centuries. The destruction of the spire by conflagration in 1566 had led to a partial repair of the fabric, but in the eighteenth year of King James its neglected state called loudly for attention. Little, however, was done until Laud became bishop of London, when he applied himself "What the Latins call magnificentia and majestas doth not consist alone in the magnitude or massiness of either the material of a building or the whole pile (for then the huge stones lying one on another, called wring-cheeses, in Cornwall, would be a magnificent structure), but in an artificial decorum or agreeable pulchritude conjoined with greatness of bulk, which two qualities, meeting together in any fabric, cause it to present itself to the eye with a certain twofold gracefulness or majesty that instantly raiseth a sort of respect, and where it is rare and excellent, a kind of delightful wonder also in the beholders."-Dr. Charleton's Chorea Gigantum. It would perhaps be difficult to describe the effect of first-rate architecture better than in this quaint passage. It seems written expressly for the Banqueting House. to the work with great zeal, and the king contributed the whole expense of erecting that splendid portico, in allusion to which Lord Burlington said of the present edifice, "When the Jews saw the second temple they wept!" Inigo Jones has been roundly and justly censured for attaching a classical portico to a Gothic church. But though the solecism be indefensible, it was not without reason that the architect himself considered this portico as the greatest of his works, and that upon which he depended for the perpetuation of his fame to future ages. Setting aside the sumptuousness of the materials which the ancients had at command, Imperial Rome could have boasted of few porticoes by which it was surpassed, and modern Europe has certainly produced none to equal it. It was not, however, for mere idle effect, or from the poverty of imagi nation which has garnished so many façades with gratuitous porticoes, that this structure was ap pended to the cathedral. It had its motive, being designed for an ambulatory in place of the nave of the church, which had long formed a place of public resort under the name of Paul's Walk. A dry plan and elevation are the only record by which we can judge of this great work; but when we consider the place occupied by the portico in proportion to the whole front, its bold projection, and the distance to which the point of sight for a general view of it must have been limited (pressed upon as St. Paul's was by the surrounding buildings even after all that had been done to disencumber it), it is not difficult to approach it in imagination, and to view it with the mind's eye casting into the background every discordant object connected with it, and standing forth in single majesty like the pronaos of a Greek temple. Inigo Jones may not, after all, have been so totally devoid of judgment as some of his commentators have assumed, and he perhaps dreamed of a future period when the church would have been better assimilated to his portico. The foundation of Whitehall may be considered as the point of division between the ancient and modern architecture of England. As the court architect, Inigo became the fashion; and among the mansions of the nobility which continued to rise until the general wreck of the civil war, there are few of any importance upon which he or his scholar Webb were not engaged. His works are numerous and widely scattered, and it is not much to the credit of his country that they have never been collected and illustrated. Kent, the architect, 'published some of his drawings in a book already referred to; a few of his works are engraved in Ware's Architecture, and others are very indifferently represented in Campbell's Vitruvius Britannicus. Among the best known by these means may be mentioned the gallery of Old Somerset House, Coleshill, in Berkshire, Stoke Park, the Royal House at Greenwich, the additions to Wilton, Cobham, and Castle Ashby;* and Gun• Castle Ashby has just been illustrated in Robinson's new Vitru PLAN AND ELEVATION OF THE PORTICO OF OLD ST. PAUL'S. The Plan of the Portico of St. Martin's Church is drawn within, in order to give an idea of the scale. nersbury and Amesbury, completed from his designs, by Webb. In this particular class of architecture his example has had a leading and lasting influence on English art. He at once obliterated all traces of our national style. Of the very few of his successors who can lay any claim to originality, the talents of Wren were diverted into a totally different channel; and, with the exception of Vanbrugh and his followers, the general character of our innumerable mansions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is that of a tame imitation of the Palladian school. Inigo has, nevertheless, left us a few buildings of a different character, and those not only among vius Britannicus, a work in which several of our ancient mansions are represented in detail, and to which we are indebted for the view of the gallery at Hardwicke, engraved in Vol. ii. p. 849. VOL. III. his early works. The addition he made to St. John's College at Oxford, begun as late as 1631, is in a semi-Gothic style. But even in this the mind of the master is conspicuous. It is entirely free from the quaint ugliness with which our architecture of this class had been infected by the Dutch school, and there is a harmony in the proportions and distribution of the ornament (in the garden front especially) which, though it might be difficult to analyze, is irresistibly attractive to the eye. In Heriot's Hospital at Edinburgh he has effected a most masterly adaptation of the national architecture. While on the subject of Inigo Jones, his researches on the origin of Stonehenge are too curious to be passed without notice. The investigation of this singular monument was imposed upon him 4 E by King James. "A man who once resolves upon ideal discoveries," says Dr. Johnson, "seldom searches in vain." The accomplished courtier no doubt fulfilled the anticipations of the royal pedant, when he discovered Stonehenge to be a Roman temple dedicated to Coelus! How far he was a believer in his own discovery may be doubted, since it was suffered to remain between himself and his master, until Webb did him the doubtful service of disclosing it to the public after his death. Whatever his theory may be worth, he displays a boundless store of knowledge and reading in support of it, and his survey and report upon the monument itself are a model for professional documents of the kind. The theory was impugned by Dr. Charleton, and vindicated by Webb, in a folio volume, valuable for the memoirs of his illustrious father-in-law which are scattered through its pages. than it has ever been destined to attain. The style of Covent Garden is at once striking and economical; but, with the exception of the arcade, scarcely a trace of its original aspect remains. During the reigns of Elizabeth and James I., the danger and inconvenience arising from the almost exclusive use of timber in the streets of the metropolis had engaged the attention of the government, and repeated proclamations were issued on the subject. subject. But as these proclamations were chiefly directed to prevent the erection of new buildings in London and the suburbs, upon such grounds, as that the increase of the city might draw the inhabitants from other cities, or collect more artisans together than could live; or cause a dearth of provisions, or trouble in governing such multitudes; it is not surprising that they were issued in vain; and with them some useful regulations fell to the ground. In 1605 a new proclamation was issued, and repeated in 1607, commanding brick or stone to be used in all street fronts; but like those which had preceded, it produced little effect, in spite of the censures of the Star Chamber, until 1614, when, examples having been set of the new mode of building in some houses of note, vigorous measures were taken to enforce it, and some of the citizens who had erected new houses of timber were compelled to demolish them. Of the earliest modern brick buildings in the metropolis a specimen still remains, in 1839, in Great Queen Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields, which it is Inigo Jones lived to fall upon evil days in his old age. He died in 1652, broken down with grief, leaving behind him a reputation which it is the lot of few to attain, since his claim to a place in the foremost rank of art has never been disputed. In less important works of architecture the change of style was of course more gradual, but it was, nevertheless, in progress; and had not the opportunity been lost in the adverse current of public affairs, the talents of Inigo Jones might probably have placed the style of our ordinary domestic buildings on a more creditable footing |