Edmund Burke, as a young Irish lawyer in 1756, first made the distinction between beauty and sublimity. Beauty for Burke was about continuity and connectedness. ‘Vegetables,’ he says, in one of the great pre-Romantic sentences, ‘are not sublime.’ Vegetables are beautiful because they are constant and continuous, and because beauty is the quality of perfect continuity: ‘The sense of being swiftly drawn in an easy coach on a smooth turf with gradual ascents and declivities is a better idea of the beautiful than anything.