THE COMING OF HISTOBICISM
engravings of Athens and Paestum and the voluminous 19th-century
books on cathedral antiquities and mediaeval details.
Amongst such books the transition can also be noted: the earliest
are still rather sketchy, while later they became more and more
thorough and as a rule rather dull. In actual buildings we find exactly
the same development from the elegant and whimsical but some-
times inspired to the learned but sometimes deplorably pedestrian.
Strawberry Hill stands for Rococo-Gothic, Robert Adam for a
Rococo-Classical Revival. The next generation is characterised by
John Nash (1752-1835). Nash had nothing of the intransigent
creative fury of Soane. He was light-handed, careless, socially
successful and artistically conservative. His frontages of old Regent
Street and most of his palace-like facades round Regent's Park,
planned and carried out between 1811 and about 1825, are still of
an 18th-century -suppleness. What makes them memorable is the
way in which they form part of a brilliant town-pknning scheme,
a scheme linking up the Picturesque of the i8th century with the
Garden City ideas of the 2OtL For these vast terraces face a landscape
park, and a number of elegant villas are placed right in the park—
the fulfilment of what had been foreshadowed in the juxtaposition
of houses and lawn in the Royal Crescent at Bath. While the Regent
Street—Regent's Park frontages are almost entirely classical, Nash
built with the same gusto Gothic if required. He had a nice sense of
associational propriety; as shown in his choice of the Neo-Classical
for his town house and of the Gothic for his country mansion
(complete with Gothic conservatory). Moreover he built Cronkhill,
in Shropshire (1802), as an Italian ate villa with a round-arched loggia
on slender columns and with the widely projecting eaves of die
Southern farmhouse (Roscoe's Lorenzo Medici had come out in
1796), he built Blaise Casde, near Bristol (1809), in a rustic Old-
English cottage style with barge-boarded gables and thatched
roofs (one is reminded of the Vicar ofWakejield, Marie Antoinette's
dairy in the Park of Versailles, and Gainsborough's and Greuze's
sweet peasant children), and he continued the Brighton Pavilion
in a Hindu fashion, first introduced just after 1800 at Sezincote, in
the Cotswolds, where the owner, because of personal reminiscences,
insisted on the style. "Indian Gothic" was the eminently character-
istic contemporary name of the style.
So here, in the early years of die ipth century, the fancy-dress
of architecture is in full swing: Classical, Gothic, ItaHanate,
J99