power applied to works of art is denominated taste. Let me then,

without further introduction, enter upon an examination whether

taste be so far beyond our reach as to be unattainable by care, or

be so very vague and capricious that no care ought to be employed

about it.

It has been the fate of arts to be enveloped in mysterious and

incomprehensible language, as if it was thought necessary that even

the terms should correspond to the idea entertained of the

instability and uncertainty of the rules which they expressed.

To speak of genius and taste as any way connected with reason or

common sense, would be, in the opinion of some towering talkers, to

speak like a man who possessed neither, who had never felt that

enthusiasm, or, to use their own inflated language, was never

warmed by that Promethean fire, which animates the canvas and

vivifies the marble.

If, in order to be intelligible, I appear to degrade art by

bringing her down from her visionary situation in the clouds, it is

only to give her a more solid mansion upon the earth. It is

necessary that at some time or other we should see things as they

really are, and not impose on ourselves by that false magnitude

with which objects appear when viewed indistinctly as through a

mist.

We will allow a poet to express his meaning, when his meaning is

not well known to himself, with a certain degree of obscurity, as

it is one source of the sublime. But when, in plain prose, we

gravely talk of courting the muse in shady bowers, waiting the call

and inspiration of genius, finding out where he inhabits, and where

he is to be invoked with the greatest success; of attending to

times and seasons when the imagination shoots with the greatest

vigour, whether at the summer solstice or the equinox, sagaciously