y may be seen to an almost painful
extent at Evreux.

[Illustration: Coutances Cathedral, Central Tower]

Our three churches, then--Coutances and Dol certainly--rank with our
smaller English cathedrals, allowing for a greater effect of height,
partly positive, partly produced by narrowness. They are, in fact,
English second-class churches with the height of English first-class
churches. Bayeux, in every way the largest of the three, perhaps just
trembles on the edge of the first-class. Coutances, the smallest, is
distinctly defective in length; the magnificent, though seemingly
unfinished, central tower, plainly wants a longer eastern limb to
support it. Even at Bayeux the eastern limb is short according to
English notions, though not so conspicuously so as Coutances. We suspect
that Dol is really the most justly proportioned of the three, though
in many points its outline is the one which would least commend itself
to popular taste. The central tower is still lower than that at Lisieux;
it is rather like that of St. Canice at Kilkenny, only just rising above
the level of the roof. But, as is always the case with this arrangement,
the effect is solemn and impressive. The low heavy central tower is a
common feature in Normandy, and one to which the eye soon gets
accustomed. The west front of Dol is imperfect and irregular; the
southern has been carried up and finished in a later style, while the
northern one, whose rebuilding had been begun, was left unfinished
altogether. The whole front is mutilated and poor, and the chief
attractions of Dol must be looked for elsewhere. The west front of
Coutances is as famous as the west front of Wells, and both, to our
taste, equally undeservedly. Both are shams; in neither does a good,
real, honest gable stand out between the two towers. The west front of
Coutances also is a mass of meaningless breaks and projections, and the
form of the towers is completely disguised by the huge excrescences in
the shape of turrets. Far finer, to our taste, is the front of Bayeux.
Though it is a composition of various dates, thrown together in a sort
of casual way, and though the details of the two towers do not exactly
agree, yet the different stages are worked together so as to produce a
very striking effect. The later work seems not so much to be stuck upon
the earlier as to grow out of it. One could hardly have thought that
spires, among the most elegant of the elegant spires of the district,