or the double clerestory. The angle
pinnacles are surrounded by the Fathers of the Church and crowned by
angels holding aloft the symbol of the Cross. The gargoyles look like
peacefully slumbering cows with unchewed cuds protruding from their
stony jaws. Tufts of grass and flowers have sprung from the seeds borne
there by the winds of centuries.

Outside the Chapel of Sant Iago are more huge heraldic devices: knights
in full armor and lions lifting by razor-strops, as if in some test of
strength, great wheels encircling crosses. Above them, gargoyles leer
demoniacally over the heads of devout cherubim. In the little street of
Diego Porcello, named for the great noble who still protects his city
from the gate of Santa Maria, nothing can be seen of the great church
but bare walls separated from the adjacent houses by a dozen feet of
dirty cobblestones. Ribs of the original chapels that once flanked the
eastern end, behind the present chapels of Sant Iago and Santa Catarina,
have been broken off flat against the exterior walls, and the cusps of
the lower arches have been closed.

Thus the fabric has been added to, altered, mutilated or embellished by
foreign masters as well as Spanish hands. Who they all were, when and
why they wrought, is not easy to discover. Enrique, Juan Perez, Pedro
Sanchez, Juan Sanchez de Molina, Martin Fernandez, Juan and Francisco de
Colonia and Juan de Vallejo, all did their part in the attempt to make
Santa Maria of Burgos the loveliest church of Spain.

The mighty western facade rises in a confined square where acacia trees
lift their fresh, luxuriant heads above the dust. The symmetry of the
towers, the general proportions of the mass, the subdivisions and
relationship of the stories, the conception as a whole, clearly show
that it belongs to an age of triumph and genius, in spite of the
disfigurements of later vandals, as well as essentially foreign masters.
It is of queenly presence, a queen in her wedding robes with jewels all
over her raiment, the costliest of Spanish lace veiling her form and
descending from her head, covered with its costly diadem.

North and south the towers are very similar and practically of equal
height, giving a happily balanced and uniform general appearance. The
lowest stage, containing the three doorways leading respectively into
north aisle, nave, and south aisle, has been horribly denuded and
disfigured by the barbarous eighteenth century, which boasted so m