notary, conveyancer, appraiser, and arbitrator. He drew the wills,
contracts, and deeds, charging for such services a moderate fee, which
added to his little store of cash. His labors of this kind, at the
beginning of the year, when most contracts were made, were often
extremely severe, occupying sometimes half the night, or even all night.
Then he made the most of his garden, which was tilled by his own hands,
until his children were old enough to help him. Upon the mountains near
by, having a right of pasturage, he kept two cows and some sheep, which
supplied the family with all their milk and butter, nearly all their
meat, and most of their clothes. He also rented two or three acres of
land, upon which he raised various crops. In sheep-shearing time, he
turned out and helped his neighbors shear their sheep, a kind of work in
which he had eminent skill. As compensation, each farmer thus assisted
gave him a fleece. In haying time, too, he and his boys were in the
fields lending a hand, and got some good hay-cocks for their pains.
Besides all this, he was the schoolmaster of the parish. Mr. Wordsworth
positively says that, during most of the year, except when farm work was
very pressing, he taught school eight hours a day for five days in the
week, and four hours on Saturday. The school-room was the church. The
master's seat was inside the rails of the altar; he used the communion
table for a desk; and there, during the whole day, while the children
were learning and saying their lessons, he kept his spinning-wheel in
motion. In the evening, when school was over, feeling the need of
exercise, he changed the small spinning-wheel at which he had sat all
day for a large one, which required the spinner to step to and fro.
There was absolutely no waste and no luxury known in his house. The only
indulgence which looked like luxury was that, on a Saturday afternoon,
he would read a newspaper or a magazine. The clothes of the whole family
were grown, spun, woven, and made by themselves. The fuel of the house,
which was peat, was dug, dried, and carried by themselves. They made
their own candles. Once a month a sheep was selected from their little
flock and killed for the use of the family, and in the fall a cow would
be salted and dried for the winter, the hide being tanned for the
family shoes. No house was more hospitable, nor any hand more generous,
than those of this excellent man. Old parishioners, who walked to church
from a distance and wished to remain for the afternoon service, were
always welcome to dinner at the parsonage, and sometimes these guests
were so numerous that it took the family half the week to eat up the
cold broken remains. He had something always to spare to make things
decent and becoming. His sister's pew in the chapel he lined neatly with
woolen cloth of his own making.
"It is the only pew in the chapel so distinguished," writes the poet,
"and I know of no other instance of his conformity to the delicate
accommodations of modern times."
Nineteen or twenty years elapsed before this singular and interesting
man attracted any public notice. His parishioners, indeed, held him in
great esteem, for he was one of those men who are not only virtuous, but
who render virtue engaging and attractive. If they revered him as a
benevolent, a wise, and a temperate man, they loved him as a cheerful,
friendly, and genial soul. He was gay and merry at Christmas, and his
goodness was of a kind which allures while it rebukes. But beyond the
vale of Seathwaite, he was unknown until the year 1754, when a traveler
discovered him, and published an account of his way of life.
"I found him," writes this traveler, "sitting at the head of a long
square table, dressed in a coarse blue frock, trimmed with black horn
buttons, a checked shirt, a leathern strap about his neck for a stock, a
coarse apron, a pair of great wooden soled shoes, plated with iron to
preserve them, with a child upon his knee, eating his breakfast. His
wife and the remainder of his children were, some of them, employed in
waiting upon each other, the rest in teasing and spinning wool, at which
trade he is a great proficient; and, moreover, when it is ready for
sale, he will lay it upon his back, sixteen or thirty-two pounds'
weight, and carry it on foot to the market, seven or eight miles."
He spoke also of his cheerfulness, and the good humor which prevailed in
the family, the simplicity of his doctrine, and the apostolic fervor of
his preaching; for, it seems, he was an excellent preacher as well. The
publication of this account drew attention to the extreme smallness of
his clerical income, and the bishop offered to annex to Seathwaite an
adjacent parish, which also yielded a revenue of five pounds a year. By
preaching at one church in the morning, and the other in the afternoon,
he could serve both parishes, and draw both stipends. Wonderful Walker
declined the bishop's offer.
"The annexation," he wrote to the bishop, "would be apt to cause a
general discontent among the inhabitants of both places, by either
thinking themselves slighted, being only served alternately or
neglected in the duty, or attributing it to covetousness; all of which
occasions of murmuring I would willingly avoid."
Mr. Wordsworth, to whom we are indebted for this letter, mentions that,
in addition to his other gifts and graces, he had a "beautiful
handwriting."
This admirable man continued to serve his little parish for nearly
sixty-eight years. His children grew up about him. Two of his sons
became clergymen of the Church of England; one learned the trade of a
tanner; four of his daughters were happily married; and, occasionally,
all the children and grandchildren, a great company of healthy and happy
people, spent Christmas together, and went to church, and partook of the
communion together, this one family filling the whole altar.
The good old wife died first. At her funeral the venerable man, past
ninety years of age, had the body borne to the grave by three of her
daughters and one granddaughter. When the corpse was lifted, he insisted
upon lending a hand, and he felt about (for he was almost blind) until
he got held of a cloth that was fastened to the coffin; and thus, as one
of the bearers of the body, he entered the church where she was to be
buried.
The old man, who had preached with much vigor and great clearness until
then sensibly drooped after the loss of his wife. His voice faltered as
he preached; he kept looking at the seat in which she had sat, where he
had watched her kind and beautiful face for more than sixty years. He
could not pass her grave without tears. But though sad and melancholy
when alone, he resumed his cheerfulness and good-humor when friends were
about him. One night, in his ninety-fourth year, he tottered upon his
daughter's arm, as his custom was, to the door, to look out for a moment
upon the sky.
"How clear," said he, "the moon shines to-night."
In the course of that night he passed peacefully away. At six the next
morning he was found dead upon the couch where his daughter had left
him. Of all the men of whom I have ever read, this man, I think, was the
most virtuous and the most fortunate.
SIR CHRISTOPHER WREN.
Of the out-of-door sights of London, none makes upon the stranger's mind
so lasting an impression as huge St. Paul's, the great black dome of
which often seems to hang over the city poised and still, like a balloon
in a calm, while the rest of the edifice is buried out of sight in the
fog and smoke. The visitor is continually coming in sight of this dome,
standing out in the clearest outline when all lower objects are obscure
or hidden. Insensibly he forms a kind of attachment to it, at the
expression of which the hardened old Londoner is amused; for he may have
passed the building twice a day for forty years without ever having had
the curiosity to enter its doors, or even to cast a glance upwards at
its sublime proportions.
It is the verdant American who is penetrated to the heart by these
august triumphs of human skill and daring. It is we who, on going down
into the crypt of St. Paul's, are so deeply moved at the inscription
upon the tomb of the architect of the cathedral:--
"Underneath is laid the builder of this church and city, Christopher
Wren, who lived more than ninety years, not for himself, but for the
public good. Reader, if you seek his monument, look around!"
The writer of this inscription, when he used the word _circumspice_,
which we translate _look around_, did not intend probably to confine the
reader's attention to St. Paul's. Much of the old part of London is
adorned by proofs of Wren's skill and taste; for it was he who rebuilt
most of the churches and other public buildings which were destroyed by
the great fire of London in 1666. He built or rebuilt fifty-five
churches in London alone, besides thirty-six halls for the guilds and
mechanics' societies. The royal palaces of Hampton Court and Kensington
were chiefly his work. He was the architect of Temple Bar, Drury Lane
Theatre, the Royal Exchange, and the Monument. It was he who adapted the
ancient palace at Greenwich to its present purpose, a retreat for old
sailors. The beautiful city of Oxford, too, contains colleges and
churches constructed or reconstructed by him. It is doubtful if any
other man of his profession ever did so much work, as he, and certainly
none ever worked more faithfully.
With all this, he was a self-taught architect. He was neither intended
by his father to pursue that profession, nor did he ever receive
instruction in it from an architect. He came of an old family of high
rank in the Church of England, his father, a clergyman richly provided
with benefices, and his uncle being that famous Bishop of Ely who was
imprisoned in the Tower eighteen years for his adherence to the royal
cause in the time of the Commonwealth.
He derived his love of architecture from his father, Dr. Christopher
Wren, a mathematician, a musician, a draughtsman, who liked to employ
his leisure in repairing and decorating the churches under his charge.
Dr. Wren had much mechanical skill, and devised some new methods of
supporting the roofs of large buildings. He was the ideal churchman,
bland, dignified, scholarly, and ingenious.
His son Christopher, born in 1631 (the year after Boston was founded),
inherited his father's propensities, with more than his father's
talents. Like many other children destined to enjoy ninety years of
happy life, he was of such delicate health as to require constant
attention from all his family to prolong his existence. As the years
went on, he became sufficiently robust, and passed through Westminster
school to Oxford, where he was regarded as a prodigy of learning and
ability.
John Evelyn, who visited Oxford when Wren was a student there, speaks of
visiting "that miracle of a youth, Mr. Christopher Wren, nephew of the
Bishop of Ely." He also mentions calling upon one of the professors, at
whose house "that prodigious young scholar, Mr. Christopher Wren,"
showed him a thermometer, "a monstrous magnet," some dials, and a piece
of white marble stained red, and many other curiosities, some of which
were the young scholar's own work.
There never had been such an interest before in science and invention.
The work of Lord Bacon in which he explained to the scholars of Europe
the best way of discovering truth (by experiment, comparison, and
observation) was beginning to bear fruit. A number of gentlemen at
Oxford were accustomed to meet once a week at one another's houses for
the purpose of making and reporting experiments, and thus accumulating
the facts leading to the discovery of principles. This little social
club, of which Christopher Wren was a most active and zealous member,
grew afterwards into the famous Royal Society, of which Sir Isaac Newton
was president, and to which he first communicated his most important
discoveries.
All subjects seem to have been discussed by the Oxford club except
theology and politics, which were becoming a little too exciting for
philosophic treatment. Wren was in the fullest sympathy with the new
scientific spirit, and during all the contention between king and
Parliament he and his friends were quietly developing the science which
was to change the face of the world, and finally make such wasteful wars
impossible. A mere catalogue of Christopher Wren's conjectures,
experiments, and inventions, made while he was an Oxford student, would
more than fill the space I have at command.
At the age of twenty-four he was offered a professorship of astronomy at
Oxford, which he modestly declined as being above his age, but
afterwards accepted. His own astronomy was sadly deficient, for he
supposed the circumference of our earth to be 216,000 miles. This,
however, was before Sir Isaac Newton had published the true astronomy,
or had himself learned it.
After a most honorable career as teacher of science at Oxford, he
received from the restored king, Charles II., the appointment of
assistant to the Surveyor General of Works, an office which placed him
in charge of public buildings in course of construction. It made him, in
due time, the architect-general of England, and it was in that capacity
that he designed and superintended very many of the long series of Works
mentioned above. There never was a more economical appointment. The
salary which he drew from the king appears to have been two hundred
pounds a year, a sum equal perhaps to four thousand of our present
dollars. Such was the modest compensation of the great architect who
rebuilt London after the great fire.
That catastrophe occurred a few years after his appointment. The fire
continued to rage for nearly four days, during which it destroyed
eighty-nine churches including St. Paul's, thirteen thousand two hundred
houses, and laid waste four hundred streets.
Christopher Wren was then thirty-five years of age. He promptly
exhibited to the king a plan for rebuilding the city, which proposed the
widening and straightening of the old streets, suggested a broad highway
along the bank of the river, an ample space about St. Paul's, and many
other improvements which would have saved posterity a world of trouble
and expense. The government of the dissolute Charles was neither wise
enough nor strong enough to carry out the scheme, and Sir Christopher
was obliged to content himself with a sorry compromise.
The rest of his life was spent in rebuilding the public edifices, his
chief work being the great cathedral. Upon that vast edifice he labored
for thirty-five years. When the first stone of it was laid, his son
Christopher was a year old. It was that son, a man of thirty-six, who
placed the last stone of the lantern above the dome, in the presence of
the architect, the master builder, and a number of masons. This was in
the year 1710. Sir Christopher lived thirteen years longer, withdrawn
from active life in the country. Once a year, however, it was his custom
to visit the city, and sit for a while under the dome of the cathedral.
He died peacefully while dozing in his arm-chair after dinner, in 1723,
aged ninety-two years, having lived one of the most interesting and
victorious lives ever enjoyed by a mortal.
If the people of London are proud of what was done by Sir Christopher
Wren, they lament perhaps still more what he was not permitted to do.
They are now attempting to execute some of his plans. Miss Lucy
Phillimore, his biographer, says:--
"Wren laid before the king and Parliament a model of the city as he
proposed to build it, with full explanations of the details of the
design. The street leading up Ludgate Hill, instead of being the
confined, winding approach to St. Paul's that it now is, even its
crooked picturesqueness marred by the Viaduct that cuts all the lines of
the cathedral, gradually widened as it approached St. Paul's, and
divided itself into two great streets, ninety feet wide at the least,
which ran on either side of the cathedral, leaving a large open space in
which it stood. Of the two streets, one ran parallel with the river
until it reached the Tower, and the other led to the Exchange, which
Wren meant to be the centre of the city, standing in a great piazza, to
which ten streets each sixty feet wide converged, and around which were
placed the Post-Office, the Mint, the Excise Office, the Goldsmiths'
Hall, and the Insurance, forming the outside of the piazza. The smallest
streets were to be thirty feet wide, 'excluding all narrow, dark alleys
without thoroughfares, and courts.'
"The churches were to occupy commanding positions along the principal
thoroughfares, and to be 'designed according to the best forms for
capacity and hearing, adorned with useful porticoes and lofty
ornamental towers and steeples in the greater parishes. All church
yards, gardens, and unnecessary vacuities, and all trades that use great
fires or yield noisome smells to be placed out of town.'
"He intended that the church yards should be carefully planted and
adorned, and be a sort of girdle round the town, wishing them to be an
ornament to the city, and also a check upon its growth. To burials
within the walls of the town he strongly objected, and the experience
derived from the year of the plague confirmed his judgment. No gardens
or squares are mentioned in the plan, for he had provided, as he
thought, sufficiently for the healthiness of the town by his wide
streets and numerous open spaces for markets. Gardening in towns was an
art little considered in his day, and contemporary descriptions show us
that 'vacuities' were speedily filled with heaps of dust and refuse.
"The London bank of the Thames was to be lined with a broad quay along
which the halls of the city companies were to be built, with suitable
warehouses in between for the merchants' to vary the effect of the
edifices. The little stream whose name survives in _Fleet_ Street was to
be brought to light, cleansed, and made serviceable as a canal one
hundred and twenty feet wide, running much in the line of the present
Holborn Viaduct."
These were the wise and large thoughts of a great citizen for the
metropolis of his country. But the king was Charles II.! Our race
produces good citizens in great numbers, and great citizens not a few,
but the supreme difficulty of civilization is to get a few such where
they can direct and control.
SIR JOHN RENNIE,
ENGINEER.
One of the most striking city scenes in the world is the view of London
as you approach London Bridge in one of the small, low-decked steamers
which ply upon the Thames. London stands where navigation for sea-going
vessels ceases on this famous stream, which is crossed at London, within
a stretch of three or four miles, by about fifteen bridges, of which
seven or eight can be seen at one view under the middle arch of London
Bridge.
Over all these bridges there is a ceaseless tide of human life, and in
the river below, besides long lines of ships at anchor and unloading,
there are as many steam-vessels, barges, skiffs, and wherries as can
find safe passage. A scene more animated, picturesque, and grand is
nowhere else presented, especially when the great black dome of St.
Paul's is visible, hanging over it, appearing to be suspended in the
foggy atmosphere like a black balloon, the cathedral itself being
invisible.
Three of these bridges were built by the engineers, father and son,
whose name appears at the head of this article, and those three are
among the most wonderful structures of their kind. One of these is
London Bridge; another is called Southwark, and the third, Waterloo. The
time may come when the man who builds bridges will be as celebrated as
the man who batters them down with cannon; but, at present, for one
person who knows the name of Sir John Rennie there are a thousand who
are familiar with Wellington and Waterloo.
He had, however, a pedigree longer than that of some lords. His father
was a very great engineer before him, and that father acquired his
training in practical mechanics under a Scotch firm of machinists and
mill-wrights which dates back to the reign of Charles the Second. It is
to be particularly noted that both John Rennie, the elder, and Sir John,
his son, derived an important part of their education in the workshop
and model-room. Both of them, indeed, had an ideal education; for they
enjoyed the best theoretical instruction which their age and country
could furnish, and the best practical training also. Theory and practice
went hand in hand. While the intellect was nourished, the body was
developed, the hand acquired skill, and the eyesight, certainty. It is
impossible to imagine a better education for a young man than for him to
receive instruction at Edinburgh University under the illustrious
Professor Black, and afterwards a training in practical mechanics under
Andrew Meikle, one of the best mechanics then living. This was the
fortunate lot of Rennie's father, who wisely determined that his son
should have the same advantage.
When the boy had passed through the preparatory schools, the question
arose, whether he should be sent to one of the universities, or should
go at once into the workshop. His father frequently said that the real
foundation of civil engineering is mechanics, theoretical and practical.
He did not believe that a young man could become an engineer by sitting
in a class-room and hearing lectures; but that he must be placed in
contact with realities, with materials, with tools, with men, with
difficulties, make mistakes, achieve successes, and thus acquire the
blended boldness and caution which mark the great men in this
profession. It is a fact that the greatest engineers of the past
century, whatever else they may have had or lacked, were thoroughly
versed in practical mechanics. Smeaton, Telford, Arkwright, Hargreaves,
George Stephenson, Rennie, were all men who, as they used to say, had
"an ounce of theory to a pound of practice."
Young Rennie worked eight hours a day in the practical part of his
profession, and spent four in the acquisition of science and the modern
languages, aided in both by the first men in London in their branches.
Four or five years of this training gave him, as he says in his
autobiography, the "_rudiments_" of his profession. His father next
determined to give him some experience in bearing responsibility, and
placed him as an assistant to the resident-engineer of Waterloo Bridge,
then in course of construction. He was but nineteen years of age; but,
being the son of the head of the firm, he was naturally deferred to and
prepared to take the lead. Soon after, the Southwark Bridge was begun,
which the young man superintended daily at every stage of its
construction.
English engineers regard this bridge as the _ne plus ultra_ of
bridge-building. A recent writer speaks of it as "confessedly unrivaled
as regards its colossal proportions, its architectural effect, or the
general simplicity and massive character of its details." It crosses the
river by three arches, of which the central one has a span of two
hundred and forty feet, and it is built at a place where the river at
high tide is thirty-six feet deep. The cost of this bridge was four
millions of dollars, and it required five years to build it. The bridge
is of iron, and contains a great many devices originated by the young
engineer, and sanctioned by his father. It was he also who first, in
recent times, learned how to transport masses of stone of twenty-five
tons weight, used for the foundation of bridges.
Having thus become an accomplished engineer, his wise old father sent
him on a long tour, which lasted more than two years, in the course of
which he inspected all the great works, both of the ancients and
moderns, in Europe, and the more accessible parts of Africa and Asia.
Returning home, the death of his father suddenly placed upon his
shoulders the most extensive and difficult engineering business in Great
Britain. But with such a training, under such a father, and inheriting
so many traditional methods, he proved equal to the position, continued
the great works begun by his father, and carried them on to successful
completion.
His father had already convinced the government that the old London
Bridge could never be made sufficient for the traffic, or unobstructive
to the navigation. A bridge has existed at this spot since the year 928,
and some of the timbers of the original structure were still sound in
1824, when work upon the new bridge was begun.