The third quarter of the nineteenth century is notable for the stylistic diversity of its production. In principle there may, perhaps, be no more difference between Visconti’s and Lefuel’s New Louvre and a Butterfield church than between Nash’s Blaise Hamlet and his terraces around Regent’s Park, to cite merely work by one early nineteenth-century architect. Yet thanks to the fugal character of the general historical development, which meant that new modes were added to the architectural repertory—as they had been at least since the twenties—more rapidly than old modes were dropped, the over-all picture became extremely complicated after 1850. It belies the most valid and idiosyncratic achievements of this period, however, to stress too much its apparently limitless eclecticism.[259] The account given in the last four chapters undoubtedly exaggerates the importance of certain modes, if that importance be measured statistically in terms of quantity of production. Qualitative considerations have led to a drastic selectivity, emphasizing relatively limited but vital aspects of architectural production at the expense of others that were far more ubiquitous but generally very dull. With different criteria of selection, using different standards of architectural quality—attainment of archaeological plausibility, say; or success or failure in the incorporation of new technical developments; or realization of programmatic aims—several very different pictures could be, and indeed frequently have been,[260] given of the architecture of the western world in these decades. At the expense of emphasizing architectural developments peculiar to the Anglo-Saxon world in this same, possibly unbalanced, fashion the next chapter is organized around the career, after 1870, of Norman Shaw, whose early work in the High Victorian Gothic has already received some attention. The chapter following that centres on the achievement of the American architect Richardson, whose somewhat parallel beginnings have also been described in this chapter. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER 12 NORMAN SHAW AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES