CONTENTS. A CRITICAL DISSERTATION ON THE NATURE AND PRINCIPLES OF TASTE. CHAP. I. On the Nature of Taste, and wherein it differs from Sensibility, or the Emotion that attends the Perception of Beauty. WHOEVER Would make himself acquainted with the original archetypes of beauty that exist in nature, or with the imitative beauties of art, whether presented through the medium of language or of painting, whether they brighten in the inspired page of a Homer or a Milton, or fix the attention of the admiring spectator to the glowing canvass of a Raphael, or an Angelo-whoever would commune with those qualities of mind that irradiate thought, and enrobe sentiment in the light vesture of beauty-must first make himself acquainted with that association or disposition of qualities in which sensible and intellectual beauty consists. It is this knowledge that constitutes taste; whence it follows, that the extent of our acquaintance with the qualities of beauty always determines the extent of our acquaintance with the principles of taste. A knowledge of the one necessarily implies a knowledge of the other; and when we say it is difficult to define taste, we only acknowledge that it is difficult to tell in what beauty consists. If the qualities of beauty were fixed and invariable, an acquaintance with them would render our ideas of taste as fixed and permanent, nor would it longer be pronounced that volatile and airy faculty which will not endure the chains of a definition, and which stands for a different idea in different minds. Beauty and taste, though they belong to different subjects, cannot be separated: the former belongs to the object perceived; the latter to the percipient. Taste is an acquired power of discriminating those qualities of sensible and intellectual being, which, from the invisible harmony that exists between them and the constitution of our nature, are endowed with the property of exciting in us pleasing and delightful emotions, in degrees proportioned to our natural sensibility, and of distinguishing from them the opposite qualities of ugliness, which excite, in similar degrees, the opposite emotions of aversion and disgust. Beauty, |