These views serve to illustrate the want of anything like a regular style, of which I spoke above; but they show how many different forces were at work to influence building in the Modern period. This division is meant to extend to and include the present time, and so great is the diversity of styles now employed that in a work like this it would be idle to attempt anything like an enumeration of them, and still less to try and determine their origin and importance. I can only give you one example of the handsome and costly homes which are being built to-day, and leave you to observe others as you now see them everywhere about the country (Fig. 132). A modern writer on American architecture claims that in private dwellings an American order is gradually being developed by the changes made to adapt foreign forms to our climate, and especially to the brilliancy of the sunlight here. All this is so difficult to define, however, that it would be impossible to show it clearly in the limits of a book like this, even if it exists. [Illustration: FIG. 132.--RESIDENCE AT IRVINGTON, NEW YORK.] What is called the "Queen Anne" style, modelled upon the English fashion of the time of that monarch, is very widely used in country houses at the present time, sometimes in conjunction with the Colonial, which also exists as an independent style. The tendency of domestic architecture is to make everything quaint and picturesque, though this is not so far carried to extremes as was the case a few years since. In public buildings many splendid edifices have been erected of late years. The imitation of classic forms which was formerly the fashion, and which is so strikingly exhibited by Girard College, Philadelphia, is now almost entirely laid aside. A lighter, less constrained style, which may be called eclectic--which means selecting--because it takes freely from any and all styles whatever suits its purpose, is arising; and as this selecting is being every year more and more intelligently done, and as original ideas are constantly being incorporated with those chosen, the prospects for architecture are more promising than ever before in this country. The Casino, at Newport, is a fine example of a modern building; and the still more recent Casino in New York shows a fine example of the adapting of ideas from Saracenic architecture to American uses. The Capitol at Albany has many fine features, but it is the work of several designers who did not harmonize. Memorial Hall, at Cambridge, is one of the more striking of modern American buildings, but its sky-line--that is, its outline as seen against the sky--lacks simplicity and repose.