The various views of the exterior are fine, but everywhere the height of the clerestory appears to be rather excessive. This is seen even at the west end, where a little management might easily have prevented it. But the two steeples standing beyond the aisles leave a narrow vertical chasm between their side walls and those of the clerestory, which is brought out, without any break in its outline by means of buttresses, quite to the west front. The lower part of these steeples is perfectly plain; each has a sort of double belfry stage, and they are both finished with low spires--that on the south pierced with open traceries, and that on the north simply crocketed; both of them are somewhat ungainly, of very late date, and not sufficiently lofty or important for the church to which they are attached. The grand feature of the west front is the beautiful porch which extends all across, forming three grand archways, corresponding with the nave and aisles, with smaller and extremely pointed arches between them. These arches are all supported on clustered shafts, standing away between four and five feet from the main wall, in which the doorways are set. Statues are set on corbels round the detached shafts, and again in the jambs of all the doorways, and the tympana and archivolts of the latter are everywhere crowded with sculpture. An open parapet is carried all across the front above the porch, and above this the west end is pierced with a row of four windows corresponding with the triforium, and again, above, by a very large and simple wheel-window. The finish of the west front is completely modernized, with a seventeenth-century gable between two pinnacles. The sculpture of the western doors well deserves description and illustration. It is charming work, of precisely the same character as the best French work of the latter half of the thirteenth century, and there is a profusion of it. The central west door has in the tympanum our Lord seated, with angels, and St. John and the Blessed Virgin worshipping on either side. Below is the Last Judgment, the side of the Blessed being as pretty and interesting as anything I have seen. A youth sits at a small organ playing sweet songs to those who go to Paradise; and a king, going jauntily, and as if of right, towards St. Peter, is met by a grave person, who evidently tells him that he must depart to the other and sadder side. The three orders of the arch are filled with the resurrection of the dead, angels taking some, and devils others, as they rise from their graves,--the whole mixed very indiscriminately. On the central shaft is a statue of the Blessed Virgin and our Lord, now with wretched taste dressed up and enclosed in a glass case, to the great damage of the whole doorway.