The opening paragraphs of Looking For Old Ontario ~ by Thomas F. McIlwraith

"Many people have looked at Ontario's landscape without really seeing it, or have been bored by what they saw.  Charles Dickens, writing in 1842, found Ontario very flat and 'bare of scenic interest';  the Canadian Illustrated News a few years later described it as 'tame and domestic.'  An 1894 tourist guide bluntly stated that between Smiths Falls and Perth 'the country is unattractive.'  John Kenneth Galbraith called his childhood area, west of St. Thomas, in the 1920s 'an uninteresting country.'  A Manitoban used words such as 'sober,' 'stable,' and 'serene' to describe his adopted province in the 1960s.  A British colleague of mine once spoke of 'beautiful monotony' after spending a day driving up and down the straight roads near Lindsay...
"The rumpled countryside is a marvellous place that Ontarians have inhabited and continually reinvented.  It may be ambiguous and perplexing, but surely not dull.
"To appreciate a living landscape we must also draw on the written record from such sources as biography and legistlative studies, to understand long-gone events."

~ University of Toronto Press, 1997
[Tomorrow:  more of Ontario.]