upola out of Wren's hands and gave it to Hogarth's father-in-law,
Sir James Thornhill. They complained of wilful delay in the work, and
accused Wren or his assistant of corruption; they also withheld part of
his salary till the work was completed. Wren covered the cupola with
lead, at a cost of L2,500; the committee were for copper, at L3,050.
About the iron railing for the churchyard there was also wrangling. Wren
wished a low fence, to leave the vestibule and the steps free and open.
The commissioners thought Wren's design mean and weak, and chose the
present heavy and cumbrous iron-work, which breaks up the view of the
west front.

The new organ, by Father Bernard Smith, which cost L2,000, was shorn of
its full size by Wren, perhaps in vexation at its misplacement. The
paltry statue of Queen Anne, in the churchyard, was by Bird, and cost
L1,130, exclusive of the marble, which the Queen provided. The carvings
in the choir, by Grinling Gibbons, cost L1,337 7s. 5d. On some of the
exterior sculpture Cibber worked.

In 1718 a violent pamphlet appeared, written, it was supposed, by one of
the commissioners. It accused Wren's head workmen of pilfering timber
and cracking the bells. Wren proved the charges to be malicious and
untrue. The commissioners now insisted on adding a stone balustrade all
round St. Paul's, in spite of Wren's protests. He condemned the addition
as "contrary to the principles of architecture, and as breaking into the
harmony of the whole design;" but, he said, "ladies think nothing well
without an edging."

The next year, the commissioners went a step further. Wren, then
eighty-six years old, and in the forty-ninth year of office, was
dismissed without apology from his post of Surveyor of Public Works. The
German Court, hostile to all who had served the Stuarts, appointed in
his place a poor pretender, named Benson. This charlatan--now only
remembered by a line in the "Dunciad," which ridicules the singular
vanity of a man who erected a monument to Milton, in Westminster Abbey,
and crowded the marble with his own titles--was afterwards dismissed
from his surveyorship with ignominy, but had yet influence enough at
Court to escape prosecution and obtain several valuable sinecures. Wren
retired to his house at Hampton Court, and there sought consolation in
philosophical and religious studies. Once a year, says Horace Walpole,
the good old man was carried to St. Paul's, to contemplate the glorious
_chef