uch
and created so little. It removed the glorious, early portico, leaving
only bare blocks of masonry shorn of sculpture. No greater wrong could
have been done the church. In the tympanum above the southern door, the
vandals mercifully left a Coronation of the Virgin, and in the northern
one, the Conception, while in the piers, between these and the central
opening, four solitary statues of the two kings, Alfonso VI and Saint
Ferdinand, and the two bishops, Maurice and Asterio, are all that remain
of the early glories. The central door is called the Doorway of Pardon.

One can understand the bigotry of Henry VIII and the Roundheads, which
in both cases wrought frightful havoc in art, but it is truly
incomprehensible that mere artistic conceit in the eighteenth century
could compass such destruction. The second tier of the screen facing the
nave, below a large pointed arch, is broken by a magnificent rose. Above
this are two finely traceried and subdivided arches with eight statues
set in between the lowest shafts. The central body is crowned by an
open-work balustrade forming the uppermost link between the towers. The
Virgin with Child reigns in the centre between the carved inscription,
"Pulchra es et decora." Three rows of pure, ogival arches, delicate, and
attenuated, break the square sides of the towers above the entrance
portals; blind arches, spires and statues ornament the angles.
Throughout, the splays and jambs are filled with glittering balls of
stone. Inscriptions similar in design to that finishing the screen which
hides the roof lines crown the platform of the towers below the base of
the spires.

The towers remained without steeples for over two hundred years until
the good Bishop Alfonso de Cartagena, returning to his city in 1442 from
the Council of Basle, brought with him the German, Juan de Colonia.
Bishop Alfonso was not to see their completion, for he died fourteen
years later, but his successor, Don Luis de Acuna, immediately ordered
the work continued and saw the figures of Saint Peter and Saint Paul
placed on the uppermost spires, three hundred feet above the heads of
the worshipping multitude.

The spires themselves, essentially German in character, are far from
beautiful, perforated on all sides by Gothic tracery of multitudinous
designs, too weak to stand without the assistance of iron tie rods, the
angles filled with an infinite number of coarse, bold crockets breaking
the outlines as they