Excerpt from History of the Modern Styles of Architecture: Being a Sequel to the Handbook of Architecture
When the 'Handbook of Architecture' was first published in two volumes in 1855, it was intended that it should have been followed by a third, completing the history of the art from the earliest day to the present time. Various engagements and occupations have hitherto prevented this intention from being carried into effect, and the concluding portion of the work is in consequence now given to the public in such a form that it may either be bound up as the third volume of the 'Handbook,' or treated as an entirely separate work complete in itself.
Even independently of the lapse of time which has occurred since the first publication, the nature of the subject demands a different class of treatment from that pursued in the earlier portions of the History. For reasons explained in the Introduction to this volume, it is no longer possible to treat it as the consecutive history of an important art, carried out in every part of the globe on the same well-understood and universally acknowledged principles. Extraneous matters and individual tastes and caprices have been imported into the practice of the art to such an extent that it is at every page necessary to stop to explain and guard against them; and this volume in consequence becomes far more a critical essay on the history of the aberrations of the art during the last four centuries than a narrative of an inevitable sequence of events, as was the case in the previous parts of the work.
Notwithstanding this, the mode of treatment is the same as nearly as was practicable with such different materials, in order that the whole might form one work; so that, except the essential distinction between the principles on which the ancient and modern styles are carried out, there is little change beyond a slight variation in the nature of the illustrations.
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