It will be seen, therefore, that this west front is planned on the most regular lines and the most ambitious scale. True, some French facades are loftier, as at Amiens for instance, but, as Professor Freeman has pointed out, the effect aimed at at York is one of breadth rather than of height, and it is an advantage that the front is not too high for the towers to rise some way above it. It is also richly decorated and well proportioned in the mass, and yet nearly every one, on first seeing it, must be struck by its curious ineffectiveness when its height and breadth, its regular outline, and profusion of ornament are considered. To tell the truth, the English architects have here endeavoured to rival the French on their own ground, and have not succeeded. The English cathedral, as has been said, was not usually planned on such lines as to make a sumptuous facade possible. Throughout the whole course of English Gothic architecture, the treatment of the west end is curiously hesitating and arbitrary. Sometimes it is altogether unambitious, as at Winchester and Norwich; sometimes boldly illogical, as at Lincoln or Peterborough; and at Salisbury, where everything else is beautiful, it is altogether unsatisfactory. In all these cases circumstances were against the architect, but at York there was every opportunity for a great architectural triumph. Yet the designer was not able to throw off his English timidity, to forget the small English features to which he was used, and to conceive his front as a gigantic whole. To begin with, he made his west window so large that every other important feature of the central division of the front had to be sacrificed to make room for it. In the great French facades the customary circular window leaves ample space for vast porches below it. These are pushed forward to a level with the great flanking buttresses, so that the actual wall of the church above it appears to be recessed. As the side porches fronting the aisles are on the same level with the main porch, the bottom part of the front is bound together, and the divisions of nave and aisle, emphasised above by the prominent buttresses, are minimised below. This arrangement gives at once unity and variety to the whole design. The towers do not appear to be external additions rising from the ground, but an integral part, the very crown and flower, in fact, of the whole design.