But there has been a discordant note in the general chorus of praise. Professor Freeman, whose admiration for nearly everything in Wells was so intense, could find little to praise in the west front of the cathedral.[3] "It is doubtless," he wrote, "the finest display of sculpture in England; but it is thoroughly bad as a piece of architecture. I am always glad when I get round the corner, and can rest my eye on the massive and simple majesty of the nave and transepts. The west front is bad because it is a sham--because it is not the real ending of the nave and aisles, but a mere mask, devised, in order to gain greater room for the display of statues ... The front is not the natural finish of the nave and aisles; it is a blank wall built up in a shape which is not the shape which their endings would naturally assume. It is therefore a sham; it is a sin against the first law of architectural design, the law that enrichment should be sought in ornamenting the construction ... not in building up anything simply for the sake of effect." He then proceeds to criticise the way in which the windows and doorways "are stowed away as they best may be," as if they were felt to be mere interruptions to the lines of sculpture. [Illustration: The West Front.] This latter objection to the doorways had often been made before, only that the "rabbit-holes on a mountain side" of earlier critics became "mouse-holes" with Mr Freeman. Mr E.W. Godwin, in a lecture in 1862, had also found fault with the crowding in of the niches over the central doorway, which he declared to be in the highest degree clumsy; with the bald appearance given by the shallowness of the reveals in the principal windows; and with the way in which "the solid work of the base suddenly crops up at the very summit of the two central buttresses, not altogether unlike the dog-kennel of modern Gothic." Of these criticisms the most serious is Mr Freeman's general charge of unreality. But why should not a stone screen be erected for the display of statuary before the west end of a church, just as lawfully as behind the high altar? And, if a screen may be allowed as an end in itself, standing simply as a thing of beauty to glorify a building of which it is not a structural part, then the front of Wells may stand, like the reredos of Winchester, as the noblest example of its kind. It has no need to simulate lofty aisles which do not exist, for it covers, not the aisles, but the faces of the great towers themselves; and, as a consequence, the portion of really blank wall which stretches from them to the central gable is so small as to be more than justified by the cohesion it gives to the whole. The whole effect is singularly broad, but so is the space it covers within; for this breadth is legitimately attained by the happy device of planting the western towers beyond the aisles.