The Germans, however, wishing to find a name to place in their Walhalla, and mistaking entirely the system on which buildings were carried out in the Middle Ages, had tried to exalt Erwin into a genius of the highest order, ascribing to him not only the nave, but also the design of the spire as it now stands. If he had anything to do with the former, he must have been promoted at a singularly early age to the rank of master-mason, and have been a most wonderfully old man at the time of his death; and if he designed the spire, he must have had a strangely prophetic spirit to foresee forms and details that were not invented till a century after his death! The fact is, Erwin did no more than every master-mason of his age could do. There is no novelty or invention in his design, and only those mistakes and errors which all Germans fell into when working in pointed Gothic. In the first place, the façade is much too large for the church, which it crushes and hides; and instead of using the resources of his art to conceal this defect, he made the vault of the ante-chapel equal in height to that of Cologne, the result being that the centre of the great western rose-window is just as high as the apex of the vault of the nave. It is true it can be seen in perspective from the floor of the church, but the arrangement appears to have been expressly designed to make the church look low and out of proportion.
The spiral staircases at the angles of the spire are marvels of workmanship, and the whole is well calculated to excite the wonder of the vulgar, though it must be condemned by the man of taste as very inferior in every respect to the purer designs of an earlier age.
It is not known whether the original design comprised two towers, like those of the great French cathedrals, or was intended to terminate with a flat screen-like façade. Probably the latter was the case, as mass, and not proportion, seems to have been this architect’s idea of magnificence.
The spire that now crowns this front, rising to a height of 468 ft. from the ground, was not finished till 1439, and betrays all the faults of its age. The octagonal part is tall and weak in outline, the spire ungraceful in form and covered with an unmeaning and constructively useless system of tracery.