beginning to show itself in the middle of the fourteenth century, which
afterwards became the most serious drawback of the whole Perpendicular
style. It is not only because the porches do not project that it appears
flat and thin. The west front of Notre Dame at Paris has no projecting
porches, yet the alternations of bare spaces of wall and of rich and
deep masses of carving, the strong horizontal lines, and the deep-set
windows, give it a boldness and strength altogether wanting at York.
Like all Norman and earlier Gothic work, it has this great merit, often
most strongly felt by people who are quite unable to explain it, that
the design seems to emphasise, and to be dictated by, the materials in
which it is carried out. The Norman architect never forgot for a
moment--he was not skilful enough to forget--that he was building with
stone. So he did not conceive of his west front as a flat space to be
ornamented, but as a wall to be built, and naturally his ornament
followed and emphasised the main lines of his building. His single
pillars, with their heavy capitals, bore witness that they were made of
great stones piled one on the top of the other; his simple windows were
merely openings in the wall to let in light.

[Illustration: The Exterior, from the South-East.]

But as masons grew more skilful, and designers more sophisticated, they
found it pleasant to play with their material; to turn their single
pillars into bundles of clustered shafts; to fill their windows with
tracery, structural at first, but afterwards as free and fantastic as
lacework. The result is often beautiful. The method gave the freest play
to the artist's invention, but it had its dangers, and they are
exemplified at York. There the designer has evidently regarded his west
front as a large space of wall to be played with, to be decorated much
as if it were a piece of embroidery, and, in his anxiety to decorate it
richly, he has lost his sense of unity and proportion. He has forgotten
to use his ornament merely to emphasise the main lines of the structure.
Where this is done, where the ornament is massed on the porches, on the
windows, and on the lines dividing the storeys, the rest of the facade
may be left alone. The bare spaces of masonry only serve to give relief
to the decoration. But at York the main lines are so neglected, they
offer so little opportunity for decoration, that the designer was afraid
to leave his walls plain, lest the whol