ABSTRACT
The eighteenth century was afflicted with fewer doubts about rationality than the twenty-first, and took it for granted that landscape attractiveness was subject to rules if only we could discover them. This was the Age of Reason, and reason was applied to this field as to most others. It was also, of course, an age of elites, where we hear very little from the people who worked the land, whose view of landscape was probably very different, so we are left with the reasons adduced for the preferences of the wealthy and educated. The most important figure is Edmund Burke, a major orator and politician as well as aesthetic thinker, and landscape (in England at least) was still firmly regarded as within the field of the arts and aesthetics.
