"Et velut æterno certamine prælia pugnasque
Edere, turmatim certantia; nec dare pausam,
Conciliis et discidiis exercita crebris."
Lucret. ii. 117.
The cost of this beautiful edifice may be estimated at about a million sterling, or, taking into consideration the difference in the value of money at the periods, one-third of what was expended on our cathedral of St. Paul. The architect of this and other noble monuments of art, Jean Germain Soufflot, born in 1704, died in August, 1781, the victim, it is said, of the jealousy of his rival artists, whose malignant attacks on his works and fame made too deep an impression on his sensitive feelings, though supported in this trial of his moral fortitude by his most intimate friend and director, that genuine philanthropist, the father and institutor of the Deaf and dumb,—the Abbé de l'Epée, in whose arms he died. No one it has been observed, was more justly entitled to have the achievement of his genius invoked, as our Wren's has been, and indicated to the inquirer, as the fit repository of his mortal remains. He did not, however, live to contemplate the completed structure. The sculptor David, who has embellished the pediment with numerous statues, is now a refugee in Brussels, possibly the relative, but certainly the political inheritor of his great namesake's ultra-revolutionary sentiments, the eminent painter, I mean, and âme damnée, as he was called, of Robespierre, an exile, too, in Belgium for many years.
The epitaph above referred to of Sir Christopher Wren, under the choir of St. Paul, celebrated as it rightly is, for its appropriate application ("Subtus conditur hujus Ecclesiæ Conditor ... Lector, si monumentum quæris, circumspice"), does not appear, I may add, to have been a primary, or original thought, for it was long preceded by one of somewhat suggestive and similar tenor in the old church of the Jesuits, now in ruins, at Lisbon (St. Jose). "Hoc mausolæo condita est Illustrissima D.D. Philippa D. Comes (Countess) de Linhares—Cujus, si ... pietatem et munificientiam quæris, hoc Templum aspice"—Obiit MDCIII. This date is long anterior to our great architect's birth (1631), and above a century prior to his death in 1723, while, again, the epitaph was not inscribed for several subsequent years.
J. R. (Cork.)
CHURCHILL THE POET.
Mr. Tooke, in the biographical notice prefixed to the new edition, says that Churchill was educated at Westminster school, and at the age of fifteen—
"Became a candidate for admission [on the foundation], and went in head of the election.... At the age of eighteen he stood for a fellowship at Merton College ... when being opposed by candidates of superior age, he was not chosen.... He quitted Westminster school; and there is a story current, that about this period he incurred a repulse at Oxford on account of alleged deficiency in the classics, which is obviously incorrect, as there is no such examination or matriculation in our Universities as could lead to his rejection. In point of fact, long before he was nineteen, he was admitted of Trinity College, Cambridge. It is equally certain that he met with some slight or indignity at Cambridge, from whence he returned immediately after his admission, disgusted at the treatment he experienced, which he afterwards visited on both universities."