Hermann, Fürst von Pückler-Muskau

Puckler's Progress: The Adventures of Prince Pückler-Muskau in England, Wales and Ireland as told in letters to his former wife, 1826-1829

Trans. Flora Brennan. Collins, 1987.

London, October 5th 1826. The town has greatly gained from the new...Regent's Park...Here Art has completely solved the difficult problem of concealing her operations in apparently freely growing Nature. You would think that a broad river was flowing far into the distance between luxuriantly wooded banks and there dividing into several branches, while in fact all you have before you is a laboriously excavated, shored up and confined, though clever piece of water.

The author, a former soldier and diplomat, had come to England in search of an heiress. He had obtained a divorce when it seemed that the only way to stave off imminent financial ruin was for the prince to marry another - and wealthy - wife; a not unusual solution for the time except that the couple still adored each other. A talented landscape designer himself, he concluded:

So charming a landscape as this, with commanding hills in the distance and surrounded by a mile-long circus of splendid buildings, is certainly a design worthy of one of the capitals of the world, and will, when the young trees have become old giants, scarcely find an equal anywhere