ing St. Paul's was £736,752 2s. 3d. for the Cathedral, and £11,202 Os. 6d. for the stone wall and railings around the Cathedral. The architect received a beggarly £200 a year during its construction, for his services. The same architect afterwards designed fifty churches to take the place of those burnt down in the Great Fire, and they are all standing to-day, I believe.

The dimensions of St. Paul's as compared with St. Peter's at Rome, are as follows:

The diameter of the gilt ball is 6 feet 2 inches; the weight 5,600 lbs., and will contain eight persons; the weight of the cross is 3,360 lbs.

The ground on which the present Cathedral stands has, from time immemorial, been sacred to Divine Worship. There was a Christian church here as early as the Second century, built, as it is supposed, by the Romans, which was destroyed during the persecutions of Diocletian, and again rebuilt, and in the Sixth century it was desecrated by the Pagan Saxons, who cel ebrated their Heathenish mysteries in the church.

It was afterwards richly endowed with lordships by Athelstan, Edgar, Ethelred, Canute, and Edward the Confessor. The Norman barons, when they came, made a raid on the property of the church as they did upon everything they saw in England, and the Saxon priests, half frightened to death by such violence, had their property returned them by Duke William, who gave it a charter on his coronation day, cursing all those who should molest the property of St. Paul's, and blessing those who should augment its revenues.

DESTRUCTION OF OLD ST. PAUL'S.

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The enumeration of the jewels, and precious stones, and gold and silver ornaments presented to St. Paul's by its various pious benefactors, takes up twenty-eight pages of Dugdale's Monasticon.

The dimensions of Old St. Paul's in the year 1315 were:

The height of the gilt ball on the top of the dome, (which was large enough to hold ten bushels of corn inside) from the ground, was 520 feet and it supported a cross, which made the entire height to the top of the cross, 534 feet. The area occupied by the edifice of Old St. Paul's was three and a half acres, one and one-half rood and 6 perches. The walls of the present Cathedral are 1,500 feet in circuit, and enclose fiveeighths of an acre, or about one-fifth of the space of the old St. Paul's. In fine, the present Cathedral is in every way inferior to the old one, and in some places it is very tawdy in decoration, while the Old St. Paul's was in many respects a finer cathedral than St. Peter's, and twenty feet deeper.

In 1561 the steeple of Old St. Paul's was burnt down, a few years after Queen Elizabeth ascended the throne, and it was subsequently decided to rebuild the Cathedral, and Inigo Jones, a far superior architect to Wren, was chosen for the task. In 1633, Archbishop Laud laid the first stone of Inigo Jones's Cathedral, which was destroyed by fire in 1666. In 1643 the building was finished at an expense of £100,000. dral was architecturally and in every way superior to that built afterward by Wren, but was as much inferior to the old Cathedral of the Middle Ages, which Wren sought to improve upon.

This Cathe

It is believed that modern European Freemasonry was first founded among the workmen who were employed in rebuilding St. Paul's, from the fact of a number of the stone masons meeting together during the work in a social fashion, and from

this casual association it is stated that the Lodge of Antiquity, of which Sir Christopher Wren was Master, originated, the occasion being the laying of the highest or lantern stone of the Cathedral in 1710-and it is stated that from this Lodge of Antiquity all the other Lodges of modern Europe have sprung.

The Cathedral contains monuments to Nelson, who is buried in a wooden coffin taken from the mainmast of the French Admiral's ship captured at the battle of the Nile the very same ship in which the boy Casabianca, the Admiral's son, "stood on the burning deck, whence all but him had fled." Nelson lies close to Wellington, and other illustrious men. His coffin is enclosed in a sarcophagus made by order of Cardinal Wolsey for Henry VIII.

Wellington is buried in the crypt of the Cathedral, in a sarcophagus made of Cornish porphyry, and near him is his old subordinate, the Irish Sir Thomas Picton, who commanded the Fighting Fifth Division at Waterloo. Queen Anne, who used to come to St. Paul's in great state and procession to thank God for the victories won for her by the Duke of Marlborough, and whom she afterwards betrayed-has a bronze statue erected in the pediment of the Cathedral.

Besides these worthies, the tombs of Collingwood, Nelson's friend, Wren, Rennie, the builder of London Bridge, and Mylne, of Waterloo Bridge, Dr. Samuel Johnson, who expected to be buried in Westminster Abbey, and was disappointed, like many others, Sir William Jones, Sir Astley Cooper, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Turner, the greatest colorist England has ever produced, Fuseli, Barry, Sir Thomas Lawrence, Opie, West and other famous painters, John, of Gaunt, Vandyke, Dr. Donne, Sir C. Hatton, Dean Colet, founder of St. Paul's School, and Sir Nicholas Bacon are buried in the crypt under St. Faith's-the parish church of St. Paul'swhich is quite contiguous to the latter.

There are monuments to Bishop Heber, Lord Cornwallis, Nelson, Reynolds, Johnson, Sir John Moore, Elliott, who defended Gibraltar, Lord Howe, Rodney, Ponsonby, Admiral Dundas, and a large number beside of their country's defenders in the Cathedral.

PRICES OF ADMISSION.

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To speak plainly the interior does not look like a church of God at all. It is simply a huge Pantheon, with monumental effigies, and slabs indicating the virtues, heroism, gallantry and acts in battle of innumerable soldiers and sailors who have fought for Britain in times gone by. The vast Rotunda and the gigantic Dome do not give the idea of a church, and the pillars and cornices have little in their aspect to make a spectator feel that he stands in the presence of the Almighty.

Yet the monuments and the vastness of the Cathedral are worthy of inspection, though the exterior of the Cathedral is far more imposing than the interior, owing to the fact that the real height of the walls of the body of the edifice is marked by a double row of pillars, which are ranged on top of each other, giving to the spectator an impression that the Cathedral walls to the roof, exclusive of the dome and cupola, are twice as high as they are in reality.

The following are the charges to see the different places in the Cathedral:-to the body of the church, 2d.; to the Whispering Gallery and the outside galleries around the dome, 6d. ; to the Library, the Model Room, the Geometrical Staircase in the south turret, and the Great Bell, which weighs 12,000 pounds, 1s.; to the Bail at the top, 1s. 6d.; to the clock, 2d., and to the vaults 1s., in all 4s. 4d. from each visitor; which is nothing less than a downright robbery. This is playing Barnum with a vengeance.

It was the great bell of St. Paul's which a soldier on the ramparts at Windsor, twenty miles away, heard striking thirteen strokes one night, instead of twelve. He was tried for sleeping on his post, found guilty, and sentenced to death, and would have suffered had it not been for his stout heart, and his persistent assertion that he heard the bell strike thirteen instead of twelve strokes. It was proved that the bell did strike thirteen on the night in question, by the mistake of the ringer, and thus the soldier was exonerated.

It was for this same bell that Henry VIII. and a dissolute nobleman named Partridge, rattled the dice one night; and finally Henry lost the stake. Partridge having won, died in the same

year in an unfortunate manner, just before he had made up his impious mind to have the bell melted down.

This was looked upon as a judgment of God, for in those days judg ments of God were of common occurrence.

The grandest sight ever seen under the dome of St. Paul's was the funeral of Nelson, which took place January 9, 1806. The body was brought through the streets from Whitehall Stairs, with the King, Lord Mayor, the Lords of the Admiralty, the Princes of the Blood, the nobles, prelates and civic companies following, through densely packed streets, which were almost impassable, for all England was there in heart, if not in body. The bands played the "Dead March in Saul" during the afternoon, and minute guns were fired from the Tower and along the wharves as the body passed. Hardy, Nelson's post-captain, and forty-eight sailors, who had seen the hero die, surrounded the corpse, and when the body was taken from the hearse into the vast Cathedral, a clear space was formed amid all that great sea of faces by the Highland soldiers of Abercromby, who had been with Nelson in Egypt and at Aboukir. Above was the immense dome, and from its dark and impenetrable depths depended a huge octagonal lantern, encircled by innumerable lamps.

Then came the words from the lips of the prelate who officiated:

"I am the Resurrection and the Life, and he who believeth in me though he were dead, yet shall he rise again," the mighty organ bursting forth-and out of all that vast multitude went forth a great, tremendous sob as the body was lowered into the grave enshrouded by the oak which came from the enemies ship, and Nelson's flag, which he had borne at his masthead in victory so often was also about to be lowered, when suddenly the forty-eight sailors of his vessel, some of whom had carried his lifeless body from the deck to the cockpit-as if moved by one impulse, closed around the grave, rent the flag in pieces, each man securing a piece of the sacred emblem upon his person, as a testament of the greatest hero England ever saw, or ever will see again.