On which with so divine a hand they strook,

Consent of motion from their breath they took."

Jones's first labour, the removal of the various foreign encumbrances that had so long oppressed and deformed the venerable edifice, Waller commemorates by a pair of references to St. Paul's history, not unhappily applied: he says the whole nation had combined with his Majesty

"to grace

The Gentiles' great Apostle, and deface

Those state-obscuring sheds, that like a chain

Seem'd to confine and fetter him again;

Which the glad Saint shakes off at his command,

As once the viper from his sacred hand."