Mr Freeman. Mr E.W. Godwin, in a lecture in 1862,
had also found fault with the crowding in of the niches over the
central doorway, which he declared to be in the highest degree clumsy;
with the bald appearance given by the shallowness of the reveals in
the principal windows; and with the way in which "the solid work of
the base suddenly crops up at the very summit of the two central
buttresses, not altogether unlike the dog-kennel of modern Gothic."

Of these criticisms the most serious is Mr Freeman's general charge of
unreality. But why should not a stone screen be erected for the
display of statuary before the west end of a church, just as lawfully
as behind the high altar? And, if a screen may be allowed as an end in
itself, standing simply as a thing of beauty to glorify a building of
which it is not a structural part, then the front of Wells may stand,
like the reredos of Winchester, as the noblest example of its kind. It
has no need to simulate lofty aisles which do not exist, for it
covers, not the aisles, but the faces of the great towers themselves;
and, as a consequence, the portion of really blank wall which
stretches from them to the central gable is so small as to be more
than justified by the cohesion it gives to the whole. The whole effect
is singularly broad, but so is the space it covers within; for this
breadth is legitimately attained by the happy device of planting the
western towers beyond the aisles.

The massive front of Wells stands, therefore, on its own merits as a
west front, and not merely a west end--a great stone screen that, so
far from pretending to be a regular termination of the nave and
aisles, is actually carried, in all its sculptured magnificence, round
the sides of the two towers upon which it so frankly depends. It is a
screen built at a period different from, and, we may now safely
assume, later than, that of the nave, and built for the exhibition of
a noble legend in stone, which has ever since been the glory of a
county famed for its splendid churches.

Taking it then for what it is, and remembering that the lower tiers
were once filled with statuary, can we regret that the doorways
themselves were subordinated to the one grand design of accommodating
this great multitude of silent teachers? The great doorways of French
churches are magnificent in themselves, but that is surely no reason
why we should make it an axiom that a front cannot be fine unless it
have a great doo