Humphry Repton's Memoirs

"Dorothy Stroud in her authoritative book Humphry Repton (1962) much regretted the loss of Repton's memoirs: 'How entertaining... how revealing...' they might have been - 'but the possibility of our enlightenment now seems unlikely.' In fact they subsequently emerged in the saleroom - at least the chapters from 1788 onwards - and here they are, admirably annotated by the two editors and prefaced by the account of Repton's early years that appeared in J. C. Loudon's The Landscape Gardening and Landscape Architecture of the Late Humphry Repton Esq. (1840). They make for a slightly haphazard but sharply observed chronicle of Repton's encounters not only with the owners of notable properties and, like Pitt and Wilberforce, the great and the good, but with the less great, too, and sometimes much less good. He touches, inevitably, on his professional relationships - with John Nash (rueful), Sir John Soane (rueful) and the Wyatt brothers - and, late in the book, there is even an extended encounter with the Prince of Wales (the Prince Regent to be) who wins him over and frustrates him in almost equal measure. The material is accessible and diverting, a totally engaging melange of place and period."--BOOK JACKET.