of breadth rather than
of height, and it is an advantage that the front is not too high for the
towers to rise some way above it. It is also richly decorated and well
proportioned in the mass, and yet nearly every one, on first seeing it,
must be struck by its curious ineffectiveness when its height and
breadth, its regular outline, and profusion of ornament are considered.
To tell the truth, the English architects have here endeavoured to rival
the French on their own ground, and have not succeeded. The English
cathedral, as has been said, was not usually planned on such lines as to
make a sumptuous facade possible. Throughout the whole course of English
Gothic architecture, the treatment of the west end is curiously
hesitating and arbitrary. Sometimes it is altogether unambitious, as at
Winchester and Norwich; sometimes boldly illogical, as at Lincoln or
Peterborough; and at Salisbury, where everything else is beautiful, it
is altogether unsatisfactory. In all these cases circumstances were
against the architect, but at York there was every opportunity for a
great architectural triumph. Yet the designer was not able to throw off
his English timidity, to forget the small English features to which he
was used, and to conceive his front as a gigantic whole.

To begin with, he made his west window so large that every other
important feature of the central division of the front had to be
sacrificed to make room for it. In the great French facades the
customary circular window leaves ample space for vast porches below it.
These are pushed forward to a level with the great flanking buttresses,
so that the actual wall of the church above it appears to be recessed.
As the side porches fronting the aisles are on the same level with the
main porch, the bottom part of the front is bound together, and the
divisions of nave and aisle, emphasised above by the prominent
buttresses, are minimised below. This arrangement gives at once unity
and variety to the whole design. The towers do not appear to be external
additions rising from the ground, but an integral part, the very crown
and flower, in fact, of the whole design.

At York the central window is so large that it leaves but little room
below it for the porch. This porch, though exquisite in itself, is not
pushed forward, but flat with the wall, and appears a mere hole cut in
the surface. It has necessarily no connection with the entrances to the
aisles; and the finest feature o