The
front is singularly impressive: it is characterised by airy
magnificence. Open screens of the most elegant tracery, and filled, like
the pannels to which they correspond, with imagery, range along the
summit. The blue sky shines through the stone filagree, which appears to
be interwoven like a slender web; but, when you ascend the roof, you
find that it is composed of massy limbs of stone, of which the edge
alone is seen by the observer below. This _free_ tracery is peculiar to
the pointed architecture of the continent; and I cannot recollect any
English building which possesses it. The basement story is occupied by
three wide door-ways, deep in retiring mouldings and pillars, and filled
with figures of saints and martyrs, "tier behind tier, in endless
perspective." The central portal, by far the largest, projects like a
porch beyond the others, and is surmounted by a gorgeous pyramidal
canopy of open stone-work, in whose centre is a great dial, the top of
which partly conceals the rose window behind.
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