Small Talk at Wreyland. First Series

by Cecil Torr

As an executor I was concerned in putting a memorial window into a country church. A relative wished for copies of the figures by Sir Joshua Reynolds in the west window of New College chapel at Oxford. There are only seven there, and this window needed nine. I thought the objection fatal; but the purveyor of stained glass replied “Oh no, not at all: we can design you two to match.” He did design them, and they matched his copies of the other seven, the copies being quite unlike the originals.

At the eastern end of Rochester cathedral there is a memorial to Dean Scott, with a gigantic Alpha and Omega on each side of the altar. As he was Dean Liddell’s partner in the great Greek lexicon, the double entendre is rather neat.

One sees trophies everywhere of captured flags and guns and other instruments of war; but the neatest trophies that I ever saw, were both at Petersburg. In the Preobrajensky cathedral there was a row of keys of captured cities, hanging up on pegs with little brass labels for the names. These came from conquests in the East; and in the Kazan cathedral there was a similar row of keys of captured cities in the West—Utrecht and Rheims amongst them.

The first time that I went over Rheims cathedral I noted in my diary:—“The exterior roof is a considerable height above the interior vaulting, and is supported by wood-work enough to burn down half-a-dozen cathedrals.” That was written on 30 March 1875, and it disturbed me in September 1914, when I heard that the Germans were bombarding Rheims, and the cathedral was on fire. The exterior roof was burnt and all this wood-work with it, but the vaulting stood the strain.

Writers on architecture do not always go to see the buildings they describe. Fergusson gives a plan, section and elevation of the church at Lodi on pages 50 to 52 of his History of Modern Architecture; and he describes the church as the earliest and best type of its class, and the only remarkable church now extant which was wholly by Bramante. On the strength of this I took the trouble to go to Lodi, 28 September 1899, in order to see the church. But it did not correspond to the designs in Fergusson. I found out afterwards that Bramante’s designs were never carried out, and the church was by Battagio.

I just missed seeing the celebrated crane upon Cologne cathedral. I went there first on 28 August 1868; and it was taken down about three months before that, after standing there on the stump of the spires for about 400 years, waiting for work to be resumed. I looked with admiration on the design for the spires, a fine old Fifteenth Century drawing—the architect sold his soul, and the Devil drew this in his blood. But the Devil had the best of it, as the spires have ruined the cathedral, being out of scale with all the rest.

Before the present Law Courts were begun, the rival designs were exhibited in sheds in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. I went to see them several times; and, speaking from memory, I should say that every one of the designs was better than what was built. But that was not the architect’s fault: he had to accept suggestions from all manner of people, each thinking only of one thing, and not considering the building as a whole. When the old Law Courts were pulled down, and the exposed side of Westminster Hall received its present screen and buttresses, a committee ruined the whole thing by forbidding the architect to carry up the little towers at the Palace Yard end—an integral part of his design. Once only, so far as I know, has such interference ended in success. Scott designed the Foreign Office block of buildings in the Gothic style; and his design may be seen in the Diploma Gallery of the Royal Academy. Palmerston could not stand Gothic, and Scott converted his Gothic to Palladian. Looking down Downing Street from the further side of Whitehall, one sees that he achieved what Linton and Turner only dreamt, when they painted their ideals of ancient Rome and Carthage.

The present Law Courts were not opened until 4 December 1882. That was six months after I was called to the Bar; and I have spoken in the old Chancery courts that have now been pulled down and forgotten—the two courts for the Vice Chancellors, that stood where there is now a lawn just inside the gateway leading into Lincoln’s Inn from Chancery Lane, and the court of the Master of the Rolls, on the other side of Chancery Lane on the site of the north-west corner of the present Record Office. I never spoke in the old Common Law courts at Westminster, but remember trials there long before I was a barrister.

I once spent a whole day there listening to the Tichborne case, and found it rather dull. But the Claimant was a sight: he was so corpulent that they cut a large semicircle out of the table to enable him to sit at it, and even then his waistcoat bulged out above the edge.

The trial in Pickwick seemed more possible then than now. I once heard Dickens read that chapter out. I am not certain of the date, but fully thirty years after he had written it; and he was no longer the same man. It fell rather flat. As a rule, authors should be read, not seen. I used to read Browning with interest and respect, if not with pleasure, until one afternoon I saw him running after an omnibus at the end of Piccadilly; and I could not stand his loftier poetry after seeing that.