ABSTRACT
Taste was a bulwark opposed to excess – whether material (e.g., luxury and the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake), religious (e.g., Methodism), or architectural (e.g., the Baroque). Perhaps as never before, mere culture was set in confrontational opposition to that Culture which embodied taste. Those who had taste considered it their duty to exercise it for the well-being of society – membership of which had not yet entirely accommodated itself (as it eventually would) to eligibility founded upon wealth as opposed to property. And it was this wealth – as the new wealth of an expanding trading class at the heart of a burgeoning empire – that engendered a degree of anxiety coursing its way through the concept of taste.
