be? "Do you call that by the light name of taste, on which the dearest interests of mankind depend? Is the feeling which a mother has for her child to be classed with the love of splendid colours, accurate imitation, and judicious description? Is there the same doubt which hangs upon both? Are the great rules of morals referable to no other and more certain proofs than those which decide upon the novel, the beautiful, and the sublime?" These are the feelings and objections which naturally pass through every man's mind, and evince the conceptions he has gradually formed of the limits and province of taste.

There is another consideration, perhaps, which has contributed to affix the limits of this metaphor. When we ascribe good or bad taste to any one, it is most commonly for doing or feeling something, where he was at full liberty to have done or said the contrary. We are not apt to impute the excellence, or the defect, where there is no fair exertion of the will. We may say of a lady that she walks in good taste, but not that she tumbles down in good taste. We could not say that a lady fainted away in good taste, though I think we might speak of a good and bad taste in blushing. For the same reason, we cannot talk of the bad taste of deep melancholy or despair, or the bad taste of being very short and very ugly; because it is presumed that all men and women would be cheerful, tall, and beautiful, if they could.

Natural tastes are sometimes so plain and strong, that they are immediately pronounced upon by everybody. The most determined sceptic, if you catch him in a moment of candour, would allow that a good ripe peach was sweet. We say that a man recognises this plain indisputable fact by his taste, though he exercises no reasoning powers, and employs no reflection in arriving at the determination. So in the plainest and most undoubted examples of intellectual taste. If he were

struck with some of the sublimest traits of Mrs. Siddons' acting, or if he was enchanted with the first view of Juan Fernandez, we should still refer these impressions to the class of tastes, even though they had cost him no effort in the acquisition, and though the feelings followed in all human beings as directly as any one fact can follow another in the various works of nature. We should call the detection of good or bad flavour, made by repeated efforts and close attention, an act of taste; and in the same manner the detection of beauty or deformity in intellectual taste, with whatever degree of labour and reflection effected. If, from natural superiority of that organ, any man could discover flavour, insensible to common palates, we of course should refer his power, however extraordinary, to taste. Or if, by long practice, he had acquired the same rapid precision, we should still refer it to the same bodily organ. So in the intellectual taste, whether the feeling follow immediately upon the perception, whether it be preceded by critical investigation, whether it be unusually delicate and true, either from natural talents or long habit, the feeling is always referred to taste, which is a general word for that affection of the mind existing in any degree, and proceeding from any cause. I lay the greater stress upon this observation, because I perceive in many persons who speculate upon these subjects, a disposition only to allow the use of the word in cases where there is a critical, active exertion of the mind, and an effort to discriminate; whereas it is undoubtedly used also, in those cases where the mind is merely passive, and where the feeling of beauty would be strongly excited in any human being, without the smallest effort to judge between conflicting sensations.

The subject of taste has given rise to a very curious controversy;—whether every feeling of taste depends upon accidental association, or whether, by the original constitution of nature, it is connected with any par

ticular object of sense, it is admitted on all hands that the feeling of beauty and sublimity very frequently, and even in a great majority of instances, depends upon mere association. For one instance:-in the estimation of Europeans, part of the beauty of a face is the colour of the cheek; not that there is something in that particular position of red colour, which, I believe, is of itself beautiful,- but habit has connected it also with the idea of health. An Indian requires that his wife's face should be of the colour of good marketable sea-coal; another tribe is enamoured of deep orange; and a cheek of copper is irresistible to a fourth. Every colour is agreeable, in each of these instances, which is connected with the idea of youth and beauty; the beauty is not in the colour itself, but in the notions which the colour summons up. Instances of this source of our ideas of the beautiful are innumerable, and universally admitted. The question is, Is there any object which originally, and of itself, excites that feeling? The very newest and the most fashionable philosophy says, No. The Rev. Mr. Alison, in his very beautiful work on Taste, says no, and says no, as he says everything, with great modesty, and great ingenuíty; but though he is a very agreeable writer, and one of the best of men, I have very great doubts if he is right in his system. "In the first "place," says Mr. Alison, "every feeling of beauty and "sublimity is an emotion. Now mere matter is unfitted "to produce any kind of emotion." If this be true, it settles the question; it is only upon the supposition that mere matter can produce emotion, that the opposite opinion has ever been advanced: it is precisely the thing to be proved. It appears to me very singular to say, that mere matter can never produce emotion upon the senses, and that we can only apply to it the expressions of sensation and perception. The theory of this school is, that Providence has created a great number of objects which it intends you should see, hear, feel, taste, and

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smell, without caring a single breath whether you exercised your senses upon them or not; that all the primary impulses of the mind must be mere intelligences, unaccompanied by any emotion of pleasure; that pleasure might be added to them afterwards, by pure accident, but that originally, and according to the scheme of nature, the senses were the channels of intelligence, never the sources of gratification. This doctrine was certainly never conceived in a land of luxury. I should like to try a Scotch gentleman, upon his first arrival in this country, with the taste of ripe fruit, and leave him to judge after that, whether nature had confined the senses to such dry and ungracious occupations, as whether mere matter could produce emotion. Such doctrines may do very Iwell in the chambers of a northern metaphysician, but they are untenable in the light of the world; they are refuted, nobly refuted, twenty times in a year, at Fishmongers' Hall. If you deny that matter can produce emotion, judge on these civic occasions, of the power of gusts, and relishes, and flavours! Look at men when (as Bishop Taylor says) they are "gathered round the eels of Syene, and the oysters of Lucrinus, and when the Lesbian and Chian "wines descend through the limbec of the tongue and "larynx; when they receive the juice of fishes, and the "marrow of the laborious ox, and the tender lard of 'Apulian swine, and the condited stomach of the scarus:" -is this nothing but mere sensation? is there no emotion, no panting, no wheezing, no deglutition? is this the calm acquisition of intelligence, and the quiet office ascribed to the senses?—or is it a proof that Nature has infused into her original creations, the power of gratifying that sense which distinguishes them, and to every atom of matter has added an atom of joy?

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That there are some tastes originally agreeable, I think can hardly be denied; and that Nature has originally, and independently of all associations, made some

sounds more agreeable than others, seems to me, I confess, equally clear. I can never believe that any man could sit in a pensive mood listening to the sharpening of a saw, and think it as naturally agreeable, and as plaintive, as the song of a linnet; and I should very much suspect that philosophy, which teaches that the odour of superannuated Cheshire cheese, is, by the constitution of nature, and antecedent to all connection of other ideas, as agreeable as that smell with which the flowers of the field thank Heaven for the gentle rains, or as the fragrance of the spring when we inhale from afar "the milk-white thorn that scents the evening gale."

One circumstance, which appears to have led to these conclusions, is the example of those same sensations which are sometimes ludicrous, sometimes sublime, sometimes fearful, according to the ideas with which they are associated. For instance, the sound of a trumpet suggests the dreadful idea of a battle, and of the approach of armed men; but to all men brought up at Queen's College, Oxford, it must be associated with eating and drinking, for they are always called to dinner by sound of trumpet: and I have a little daughter at home, who, if she heard the sound of a trumpet, would run to the window, expecting to see the puppet-show of Punch, which is carried about the streets. So with a hiss: a hiss is either foolish, or tremendous, or sublime. The hissing of a pancake is absurd; the first faint hiss that arises from the extremity of the pit on the evening of a new play, sinks the soul of the author within him, and makes him curse himself and his Thalia; the hissing of a cobra di capello is sublime, it is the whisper of death! But all these instances prove nothing; for we are not denying that there are many sounds, tastes, and sights, which nature has made so indifferent, that association may make them anything. It is very true what Mr. Alison says, "that there are many sensations uni"versally called sublime, which association may make