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Hilaire Belloc
The History of The Thames
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But all these things, though one may put them in the form of statements, are really questions; and questions to which no sort of answer has yet been discovered.
A far more splendid sight was the Gothic group of London as one came upon it up river before the Great Fire. A score of spires stood in varying height and perspective before the master spire of the cathedral. Old St. Paul’s upon its hill carried the loftiest cross in Christendom—far higher in the air than Strasburg; and old St. Paul’s had been built, as had nearly every great monument of the Middle Ages, with a special eye to the landscape whence it should be seen and which, in a sense, it should control. The huge and somewhat ill-proportioned pyramid of St. Dunstan’s by the very excess of its bulk made a landmark which is the first thing to strike us when we look at a sketch of the river made at any time before 1665. We are fortunate, moreover, in our retention of such memorials. No other northern town, I think, possesses a complete panorama of its appearance in the first half of the sixteenth century such as London possesses in the great work of Wyngaerde in the Bodleian. And though the seventeenth century, with its triumph of engraving, produced a great number of such documents throughout Europe, Visscher’s drawing is unique in its importance, while we have at the end of the series Hollar’s careful delineation of the square mile of ruins after the Great Fire.
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