Note 1313 — AN ESSAY ON MAN, IN FOUR EPISTLES (continued 3)
Reading edition
The MS. has the lines which follow:
Boast we of arts? a bee can better hit The squares than Gibbs, the bearings than Sir Kit. To poise his dome a martin has the knack, While bold Bernini lets St. Peter's crack.
Gibbs was born about 1674 and died in 1754. He designed St. Martin's church in London, and the Radcliffe library at Oxford. Sir Kit is Sir Christopher Wren. A century after the dome of St. Peter's was erected, Bernini inserted staircases in the hollow piers which support the cupola, and the cracks in the dome were falsely ascribed to his operations. The martins are not more infallible than man, and, unlike man, they do not profit by experience. White of Selborne relates that they built in the window corners of a house in his neighbourhood, where the recess was too shallow to protect their work, which was washed down with every hard rain, and yet year after year they persevered through the summer in their useless drudgery.