I want to offer a comment on some ideas about landscape that are commonly found among writers on art, on literature, and on various other subjects in the second half of the eighteenth and in the early years of the nineteenth centuries in Britain. The main point of my doing this is to show how a correct taste, here especially for landscape and landscape art, was used in this period as a means of legitimating political authority, particularly but not exclusively within the terms of the discourse of civic humanism. If we interrogate writers of the polite culture of this period on the question of what legitimates this claim, one answer we repeatedly discover, though it may take very different forms, is that political authority is rightly exercised by those capable of thinking in general terms; which usually means those capable of producing abstract ideas – decomplex ideas – out of the raw data of experience. The inability to do this was usually represented as in part the result of a lack of education, a lack which characterized women and the vulgar; and because women are generally represented in this period as incapable of generalising to any important degree, I shall be in this paper very careful not to use a vocabulary purged of sexist reference: when I speak of what men thought, of Man in general, of the spectator as he, I am doing so with forethought, and in order to emphasize the point that, in the matter of political authority, legitimated as I have described, women were almost entirely out of the question, and the issue to be determined was which men could pass the test of taste.