composition of lancets, inside and out, is, as it should be, the main feature; at Wells the west window is made nothing of; it is simply cut through the sculpture. The small size of doorways is a common fault of English as opposed to foreign churches; but at Wells they reach the extreme point of insignificance in those narrow mouse-holes at the end of the aisles, through one of which we are commonly driven to creep, while the west doorway remains shut. But even the west doorway itself is a very small mouthful, I will not say after Laon or Rheims, but after York; nay even at Lichfield and Salisbury the doorways have a little more of dignity than they have at Wells. In a really good design the architectural features ought to be the first thing; sculpture or any other source of ornament should be secondary. At Wells the rule is reversed; a sham wall is built up and loaded with statues, and the windows and doorways are left to shift for themselves. You may perhaps be surprised, perhaps even a little indignant, at the freedom of my criticism on a work which you have doubtless all learned to look on with traditional admiration. But there is nothing like truth, and I think that, if you go and fairly examine for yourselves, you will see that the censures which I have made on our west front rest on good grounds. Those censures are pretty well summed up in the one charge of unreality. But, if we can get over that charge, there is much to be said for the design on the score of boldness and originality. You know that the towers, instead of standing, as usual, at the ends of the aisles, stand beyond them, an arrangement which I have seen nowhere else except in the metropolitan church of Rouen.[20] Now in a church of the comparatively small size of Wells the effect of this arrangement is undoubtedly to sacrifice height to width, and thereby to take away from the truest dignity of the front. Still it is not to be denied that even the width has a dignity of its own, and the arrangement was well planned with regard to the special object in view, that of gaining the greatest possible space for the display of sculpture. And after all, though the west front of Wells is a sham, it is by no means so contemptible a sham as the west fronts of either Salisbury or Lincoln. The form given to the front, if unreal, is at least stately. At Salisbury the form given to the front is equally unreal, and it is indescribably mean; as no western towers were intended, one cannot conceive why the natural endings of the nave and aisles were not left, as at Winchester, Gloucester, and Bath, and in our great parish churches of Yatton and Crewkerne. The Wells front again is at least a whole; the Lincoln front is a mass of incongruous pieces. Large parts of two earlier fronts are left to disturb the harmony of the design, and a blank wall is actually carried in front of two of the noblest towers in the world, as if of set purpose to destroy their effect. The