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Abstract
‘I do not mean, like an Empiric, to enhance the value ofmy cure, by magnifying the badness of my patient's case, but I must confess, that I was more alarmed at the unpromising appearance of Sarsden, than at any subject on which I had ever before been consulted ...’ Thus wrote Humphry Repton in the opening lines of his Red Book addressed to John Langston, MP and Oxfordshire squire, in March 1796.1 While acknowledging that Sarsden was one of the most compact and best conditioned estates in the country, he had not liked the naked hills, where stone walls and ploughed fields spread themselves before his eyes in every direction when he made his visit in the previous autumn. Repton did not shrink from telling his client the worst, though he conveyed his sentiments poetically by invoking Mason's words from the First Book of his English Garden: