Sir Christopher Wren

COUNTRY LIFE
THE CHIEF WORKS OF WREN. A tribute by C. R. Cockerell, R.A.
SIR CHRISTOPHER WREN
SCIENTIST, SCHOLAR AND ARCHITECT
BY SIR LAWRENCE WEAVER K.B.E., F.S.A., Hon. A.R.I.B.A.
LONDON PUBLISHED AT THE OFFICES OF “COUNTRY LIFE,” LTD., 20, TAVISTOCK STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C. 2, AND BY GEORGE NEWNES, LTD., 8-11, SOUTHAMPTON STREET, STRAND, W.C. 2. NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS MCMXXIII
Printed in Great Britain
This little book pretends to be neither a Life of Wren nor a detailed record of his achievement. His working years were more than seventy. At fifteen the inventor of a weather-clock and the author of a Theory of Trigonometry which delighted Sir Charles Scarborough, he died in his ninety-first year, not indeed in professional harness, but still working at the multitudinous problems to which his life had been devoted.
When the definitive “Life and Works” comes to be written, it will itself be someone’s life-work, if it is to be adequate.
I attempt no more than to give impressions of the many sides of a great Englishman, and have taken the liberty to ignore the chronological order which is fitting in a biography.
My old friend Henry Wheatley pleased himself with the notion that people who write get a grossly unfair share of the world’s praise, for the relative greatness of men is judged by what writers say of them, and writers are obsessed by the importance of their own craft.
It is also true that architecture has been in England an inarticulate trade, and one regarded in our generation as a technical mystery with which we are little concerned.