contemplated a
sewer on the south side; but the surveyor, Mr. R. Cockerell,
remembering that the sand and shells underneath the loam would be in
danger of oozing out, went in great haste to him, and on their joint
representation the project was abandoned.

The old cathedral was not due east and west, neither did it directly
face Ludgate Hill. Owing to the lie of the land cleared away, both of
these peculiarities were increased by the surveyor, and the axis of
the New St. Paul's was swung some seven degrees further north than the
Old. He thereby made the best of his somewhat cramped site, and
avoided the foundations of the old walls. The excavations were not
completed nor the site fully cleared and made ready until 1674.

[Illustration: RELATIVE POSITION AND AREA OF THE GROUND-PLANS OF
OLD AND NEW ST. PAUL'S.
_Reproduced from Longman's "Three Cathedrals of St. Paul's."_]

It has been the lament of many that the Pointed arch had by the time
of the Fire died out, and that the Renaissance style, borrowed from
Italy, had taken the place in England of Gothic architecture. "About
two hundred years ago," we are told in the "Parentalia," "when
ingenious Men began to reform the _Roman_ Language to the Purity which
they assigned and fixed to the Time of _Augustus_ and of that Century,
the Architects also, ashamed of the modern Barbarity of Building,
began to examine carefully the Ruins of _Old Rome_ and _Italy_; to
search into the Orders and Proportions, and to establish them by
inviolable Rules: so to their Labour and Industry we owe in a great
Degree the Restoration of Architecture." Here we have the Renaissance
style defined. Wren would naturally have fallen in with the fashion of
his own time; and the faults he found in his elaborate surveys at Old
St. Paul's, Salisbury, and elsewhere confirmed him in his adherence.
He found "a Discernment of no contemptible Art, Ingenuity and
geometrical Skill in the Design and Execution of some few"; but this
was more than counterbalanced by grave faults: "An affectation of
Height and Grandeur, tho' without Regularity and good Proportion, in
most of them." They are loaded with too much carving and tracery, and
in other ways offend his taste, but chiefly in the neglect of a due
regard to stability. "There is scarce any _Gothick_ Cathedral, that I
have seen, at home or abroad, wherein I have not observed the Pillars
to yield and bend inwards from the Weight of the Vault of the Ail