d away with work of a later style.
Still, allowing for the diversity of the towers, which of course does
not appear inside, Chartres is a whole--a consistent, harmonious whole,
of great, though we cannot think of first-rate, excellence. How does
such a whole stand as compared with a building of strange, and at first
sight, unintelligible outline, formed by the juxtaposition of two parts,
each of admirable merit in itself, but which startle by their absolute
contrast in every way? Chartres was made, Le Mans eminently grew; and
different minds will be differently inclined in the comparison between a
single harmonious work of art and a union of two buildings widely
differing in date, style, and proportion. But, on the other hand, it
must be said that nothing at Chartres equals the parts of Le Mans
taken separately, and that, in the inside at least, the incongruity of
Le Mans is far from being felt in the unpleasant way that might have
been looked for.

[Illustration: Le Mans Cathedral, N.W.]

The general effect of Le Mans Cathedral, as seen from any point but the
east, is certainly perplexing. From the east indeed, from the open place
below the church and the Roman wall, once a marsh, the apse, with its
flying buttresses and surrounding chapels, rises in a grandeur before
which Chartres is absolutely dwarfed, and which gives Amiens itself a
very formidable rival. We here see the main source of our difficulties,
namely that the church has but a single tower, and that at the end of
the south transept. Viewed from any other point--looking up, for
instance, at the old town from the other side of the river--what one
sees is a lofty body with a tower at one end of it, which one is
inclined rashly to assume to be the nave, with a western tower, and a
lower body joining it at right angles. This last is the real nave of the
church, and a magnificent building it is. The truth is that, at Le Mans,
as in various other churches in France, the Gothic builders, from the
thirteenth century onwards, designed a complete rebuilding. They began
at the east, they rebuilt the choir and transepts, but they never got
any further, so that the ancient nave remains. So it is at Bordeaux and
Toulouse; so it is at Beauvais, where the small but precious fragment
of early work, which looks like an excrescence against the gigantic
transept--the _Basse Oeuvre_, as it is locally called--is really the
ancient nave--.[63] So it is in a certain sense at Limo