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APPENDIX

"He, (Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk) knowing that learning hath no enemy but ignorance, did suspect always the want of it in those men who derided the habit of it in others, like the fox in the fable, who being, by mischance or degeneracy, without a tail, persuaded others to cut theirs off as a burden. But he liked well the philosopher's division of men into three ranks; some who knew good and were willing to teach others.— These he said, were like gods among men ; others who though they knew not much, yet were willing to learn and thankful for instruction.-These, he said, were like men among beasts; and some who knew not truth or good, and yet despised and maligned such as would teach them.-These he esteemed as beasts among men."-Lloyd's State Worthies, p. 33.

THUS, then, let us at once sum up and exemplify the whole. Its ambrosial odour renders the rose more agreeable to us, but it is not by this addition, that nature wrests the palm of beauty from the flower-pieces of Van Huysun. The patience, strength, and laboriousness of the Ox and 5 the Ass, invaluable as we rightly deem them, can yet by no influence of association, bribe us to compare them in charm of form, and disposition of colors, with the fierce and untamable Zebra. The rough Sheep-dog is almost indispensable to the civilization of the human race. He appears 10 to possess not Valuableness only, but even Worth! His various moral qualities, which seem above the effects of mere Instinct devoid of Will, compel our respect and regard, and excite our gratitude to him, as well as for him. Yet neither his paramount utility, no, nor even his incorruptible 15 fidelity and disinterested affection, enable us to equal him, in outward beauty, with the cruel and cowardly panther, or leopard, or tiger, the hate and horror of the flock and of the shepherd.

But may not the sense of Beauty originate in our per- 20 ception of the fitness of the means to the end in and for the

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animal itself? Or may it not depend on a law of Proportion? No! The shell of the Oyster, rough and unshapely, is its habitation and strong hold, its defence and organ of locomotion: the pearl, the beautiful ornament of the beau5 tiful, is its disease. How charming the Moss Rose with its luxuriancy of petals ! That moss, that luxuriancy, are the effects of degeneracy, and unfit the flower for the multiplication of its kind. Disproportion indeed may in certain cases preclude the sense of Beauty, and will do so wherever 10 it destroys or greatly disturbs the wholeness and simultaneousness of the impression. But still proportion is not the positive cause, or the universal and necessary condition of beauty, were it only that proportion implies the perception of the coincidence of quantities with a pre-established an 15 rule of measurement, and is therefore always accompanied with an act of discursive thought. We declare at first sight the Swan beautiful, as it floats on with its long arching neck and protruding breast, which uniting to their reflected image in the watery mirror, present to our delighted eye the ao stringless bow of dazzling silver, which the Poets and Painters assign to the God of Love. We ask not what proportion the neck bears to the body; -through all the changes of graceful motion it brings itself into unity, as an harmonious part of an harmonious whole. The very word part 25 imperfectly conveys what we see and feel; for the moment we look at it in division, the charm ceases. In this spirit the Lover describing the incidents of a walk on the riverbanks by moonlight is made by the poet to exclaim :

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"The pairing swans have heard my tread,
And rustle from their reedy bed.

O beauteous birds! methinks ye measure
Your movements to some heavenly tune!
O beauteous birds! 'tis such a pleasure
To see you move beneath the moon,

I would it were your true delight
To rest by day and wake all night.”

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The long neck of the ostrich is in exact and evident proportion to the height of the animal, and is of manifest utility and necessity to the bird, as it stoops down to graze and still walks on. But not being harmonized with the body by plumage or color, it seems to run along the grass like 5 a serpent before the headless tall body that still stalks after it, inspiring at once the sense of the Deformed and the Fantastic.

I here close my metaphysical Preliminaries, in which I have confined myself to the Beauty of the Senses, and by 10 the Good have chiefly referred to the relatively good. Of the supersensual Beauty, the Beauty of Virtue and Holiness, and of its relation to the ABSOLUTELY GOOD, distinguishable, not separable (even such relation as that of color to the Light of Heaven, and as the Light itself bears to the Know- 15 ledge, which it awakens), I discourse not now, waiting for a loftier mood, a nobler subject, a more appropriate audience, warned from within and from without, that it is profanation to speak of these mysteries "roîs μndéπote φαντασθεῖσιν, ὡς καλὸν τὸ τῆς δικαιοσύνης καὶ σωφροσύνης πρόσω- 20 πον, καὶ ὡς οὔτε ἕσπερος οὔτε ἑῷος οὕτω καλά. Τὸν γὰρ ὁρῶντα πρὸς τὸ ὁρώμενον συγγενὲς καὶ ὅμοιον ποιησάμενον δεῖ ἐπιβάλλειν τῇ θέᾳ· οὐ γὰρ ἂν πώποτε εἶδεν ὀφθαλμὸς ἥλιον, ἡλιοειδής μὴ γεγενημένος, οὔδε τὸ καλὸν ἂν ἴδοι ψυχὴ μὴ γενομένη.”

FRAGMENT OF AN ESSAY ON

TASTE. 1810

THE same arguments that decide the question, whether taste has any fixed principles, may probably lead to a determination of what those principles are. First, then, what is taste in its metaphorical sense, or, which will be the easiest 5 mode of arriving at the same solution, what is there in the primary sense of the word, which may give to its metaphorical meaning an import different from that of sight or hearing, on the one hand, and of touch or smell on the other? And this question seems the more natural, because 10 in correct language we confine beauty, the main subject of taste, to objects of sight and combinations of sounds, and never, except sportively or by abuse of words, speak of a beautiful flavor or a beautiful scent.

Now the analysis of our senses in the commonest books 15 of anthropology has drawn our attention to the distinction between the perfectly organic, and the mixed senses ;-the first presenting objects, as distinct from the perception,— the last as blending the perception with the sense of the object. Our eyes and ears-(I am not now considering 20 what is or is not the case really, but only that of which we are regularly conscious as appearances)—our eyes most often appear to us perfect organs of the sentient principle, and wholly in action, and our hearing so much more so than the three other senses, and in all the ordinary exertions of that 25 sense, perhaps, equally so with the sight, that all languages place them in one class, and express their different modifications by nearly the same metaphors. The three remain

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ing senses appear in part passive, and combine with the perception of the outward object a distinct sense of our own life. Taste, therefore, as opposed to vision and sound, will teach us to expect in its metaphorical use a certain reference of any given object to our own being, and not 5 merely a distinct notion of the object as in itself, or in its independent properties. From the sense of touch, on the other hand, it is distinguishable by adding to this reference to our vital being some degree of enjoyment, or—the contrary-some perceptible impulse from pleasure or pain to 10 complacency or dislike. The sense of smell, indeed, might perhaps have furnished a metaphor of the same import with that of taste; but the latter was naturally chosen by the majority of civilized nations on account of the greater frequency, importance, and dignity of its employment or 15 exertion in human nature.

By taste, therefore, as applied to the fine arts, we must be supposed to mean an intellectual perception of any object blended with a distinct reference to our own sensibility of pain or pleasure, or vice versa, a sense of enjoyment or 20 dislike co-instantaneously combined with, and appearing to proceed from, some intellectual perception of the object ;intellectual perception, I say; for otherwise it would be a definition of taste in its primary rather than in its metaphorical sense. Briefly, taste is a metaphor taken from one 25 of our mixed senses, and applied to objects of the more purely organic senses, and of our moral sense, when we would imply the co-existence of immediate personal dislike or complacency. In this definition of taste, therefore, is involved the definition of fine arts, namely, as being such, 30 the chief and discriminative purpose of which it is to gratify the taste, that is, not merely to connect, but to combine and unite, a sense of immediate pleasure in ourselves with the perception of external arrangement.

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The great question, therefore, whether taste in any one 35

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