Since Keble was founded by Butterfield’s pious High Church friends for clerical students, the chapel, which was added to the group in 1873-6, understandably dominates the whole. Tall and richly decorated, this has many of Butterfield’s virtues, but it quite lacks the directness and the poignance of his best work of the fifties and early sixties. The hall and library are less monumental than the chapel, fitting more easily into the ranges of sets that surround the two quadrangles. The over-all composition is fairly regular, and there is less coarse or fussy detailing than Scott and Waterhouse used for their ‘Collegiate Gothic’. Moreover, the scale of Keble is modestly domestic and, despite its considerable size, the features are simple and crisp; but in the relatively clean air of Oxford Butterfield’s polychromy has received less of the desirable mellowing than it gets in London. The banded walls certainly lack the harmony that the softer colours of the materials used in his country church interiors generally produced. By the time Keble was completed—indeed in advanced circles well before it was begun—such polychromatic brashness was out of date. Yet at Rugby School, where Butterfield’s buildings of 1868-72 awkwardly adjoin various earlier nineteenth-century Gothic structures, the polychromy is even louder; moreover, it is still less mellowed by time. Although Butterfield lived on through the rest of the century and continued to build many churches and some schools, this first and boldest of High Victorian Gothic architects was more and more left behind after the mid sixties by the evolving taste of his own High Church milieu. There are other High Victorian Gothic collegiate groups which are, or would have been if carried to completion, far finer than Keble. Being at less renowned institutions than Oxford, they are less well known. University College on the sea-front at Aberystwyth in Wales is by J. P. Seddon (1827-1906), from 1852 to 1862 a partner of John Prichard. This structure was begun in 1864 to serve as a hotel, incorporating as its most inappropriate nucleus a small Castellated villa built by Nash for Uvedale Price in the 1780s. The failure of the hotel project, the slow and faltering start of the college, and the necessary repair and rebuilding after two fires have left a complex pile of most disparate character, even though it is almost all by Seddon. But certain aspects of the building, the bowed section on the sea-front—originally the hotel bar, later the college chapel!—and the entrance and stair tower on the rear are among the grandest and most boldly plastic fragments produced in this period (Plate 91A). Neither Oxford nor Cambridge has anything of comparable quality.