was shown in most of the other cases. Let us take the two ends of the church, the two parts to which a church owes so much of its external character, the east end and the west front. Now the west front of Wells is a thing which it is the fashion to rave about. It is the finest part of the church; the finest thing in Somersetshire; the finest thing in England; for aught I know, the finest thing in the world. I am perverse enough to think differently, and to look on the west front as the one part of the church of Wells which is thoroughly bad in principle. It is doubtless 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 architecture, in short, is sacrificed to the sculpture. A real honest west front, if it have two towers, will be made by the real gable of the nave flanked by a tower at the end of each aisle. So it is at York; so it is at Abbeville; so it is at Llandaff. Or a front may, like those of Winchester, Gloucester, and Bath, have no towers at all, but may simply consist of the endings of the nave and aisles, set off with turrets and pinnacles. Or a front may be, like that one glorious and unequalled front at Peterborough, built up in front of and across the endings of the nave and aisles, but without at all professing to be itself their finish. All these forms are honest; but I deny the honesty of such fronts as those at Wells, Salisbury, and Lincoln.[19] In all these cases 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, in giving a pleasing form, and such enrichment as may be thought good, to those features which the construction makes absolutely necessary, not in building up anything simply for the sake of effect. The main features in a front should be the windows and doorways. There must be some windows and some doorways; it is the business of the architect to make these necessary features the main sources of ornament. Now in the Wells front the windows and doorways are made nothing of; they could not be altogether got rid of, but they seem to have been felt as mere interruptions to the lines of sculpture. They are therefore stowed away as they best may be, and they do not form, as they should, the main features of the front. Look, for instance, at Llandaff; the front suffers much from the incongruity of the two towers built at different times: but look at the ending of the nave itself; that perfect