Wells front, after all, unreal as it is, has more connexion with the main building than that of Beverley, where a front, poorly imitated from that of York, is built up against the church, with a gable which has no reference whatever to the real gable of the nave.[21] At Wells, again the later builders seem to have had more feeling than usual for the harmony of the front. Wells has not suffered like Southwell, where a huge Perpendicular window was cut through the noble Romanesque front, and a sham wall with a flat battlement carried up above it. The towers were carried up in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in a way which harmonizes very well with the general design of the front, though there is no kind of adaptation to its details. And here comes the question which I believe everybody asks at a first sight of Wells Cathedral. As I once heard it clearly and tersely put, "Well, that is a fine piece of work, but what are those pieces without their tops?" Every one, I suppose, feels the unfinished look of the towers; the eye craves for something or other more than there is, be it pinnacles, spires, or anything else. Now I once very carefully examined the tops of the towers in company with Mr. Parker, and we could see no signs that there ever had been, or had been designed to be, any stone-work more than there is now. But any sort of finish that any one chooses to imagine may have been added, or designed to be added, in wood. I suspect that people seldom take in how many of our great churches had their towers finished with spires of wood covered with lead or shingle. Spires of this sort were either destroyed by accident or taken away in wantonness at Old Saint Paul's, Lincoln, Ely, Hereford, Exeter, Southwell, and a crowd of other churches. A single one of two still remains at Ottery Saint Mary. On the Continent they are far more common, and they sometimes furnish beautiful examples of work in lead. Among the English examples, the towers of Lincoln supply the example which is most instructive for our own case. The spires are gone, but the angle turrets are still finished with pinnacles of wood covered with lead. Whether such an arrangement as this ever actually existed at Wells I do not know, but there can be no doubt that a finish of this kind, spires of wood sheeted with lead, with pinnacles of the same materials at the angles, would be the true means of getting rid of the flat and imperfect look of which every one complains.