Introduction 



HUMPHRY REPTON was born at Bury 

 Saint Edmunds, England, May 2, 1752, 

 and died at Harestreet, Essex, March 24, 1818. 

 The period covered by his Ufe is in many respects 

 the most important in the history of landscape 

 gardening. It is true that the reaction from the 

 absurdities and excesses of formal gardening and 

 the awakening to the beauty and value of a natural 

 rural landscape came before his time. Addison 

 and Pope were the most influential of the literary 

 advocates of this great change, and William Kent 

 and his successor " Capability " Brown were the 

 practical men who applied the new ideas to the 

 country-places of England, often indeed ruthlessly 

 destroying formal grounds of great beauty in the 

 zeal of a somewhat unbalanced reaction. But it 

 is to the period of Repton and the work of Rep- 

 ton himself that we must look for the sound 

 and rational development of the so-called land- 

 scape school of England, a school whose influence 

 spread rapidly to the Continent of Europe and 

 whose principles still control the treatment of 

 large areas in the informal or naturalistic style. 



This change in taste was not confined to gar- 

 dening. It manifested itself in all the artistic 



