tivate an acquaintance with our feelings, unless we also enrich our minds with principles, we shall vainly aspire to critical knowledge. True principles can never lead us into error, but none can be true that are not originally founded in the common feeling of mankind. We may be ignorant of principles, but we cannot possibly be ignorant of our feelings, if we only attend to them; and they are so happily contrived by the Author of nature, that they incline us to truth, when we are even unable to assign a cause; and they would always direct us right, if we could always see without principles, experience, or the habits of comparison, all the qualities in an object that are fitted to excite emotions in us when perceived. Principles do not possess this advantage when they are only few in number, for then they generally lead us astray. But when we become master of all the principles of beauty, in poetry, other art, we never find that they lead us to any conclusion to which our feelings are opposed. When principles are perfect, they always agree with our feelings; when imperfect, our feelings hardly ever agree with them. He who is but imperfectly acquainted with the principles of criticism is therefore always safer in trusting to his feelings than to his principles; but it is still certain that little reliance can be placed on his judgment in either case; for the feelings of

or any

such a man must be very different from the feelings of him who has enriched his mind with the rules and principles of beauty, elegance, and correctness. The feelings of the latter are principles in themselves: the habit of judging correctly induces insensibly a habit of feeling correctly; so that the feelings and principles of a man of taste are so closely allied, that it is difficult to tell which is which. Feelings thus finely turned to an exquisite sense of the beauties of nature and of art, will not easily be led into a false perception of beauty. To judge by principles, when properly understood, is to judge by feeling: the only difference is, that when we judge by principles, we judge by the feelings of mankind at large; for a true principle of taste simply expresses how the generality of mankind would feel on a certain occasion. The true critic would therefore prefer this principle to any contrary feeling of his own, because he knows that the common feeling of mankind is the true standard of taste, and that nothing but intellectual anarchy would ensue, if every individual attempted to obtrude his own feelings on the world as a standard of elegance. Here then, alone, principles should take the lead of our feelings; but when the critic is called to decide upon any question of taste, though he must, in the first instance, be governed by such acknowledged prin

ciples as are most applicable to the question; yet if it involve any relation or qualities whatever that are peculiar to itself, and which make it so far differ from all other questions on subjects of taste that can be decided by acknowledged principles, he must not be ultimately guided by principles themselves, but, adhering to them implicitly, so far as they apply to the subject before him, consult his feelings alone with regard to the circumstances in which they differ. It is by this application of our feelings to our principles, that we can alone form correct judgments; and without this urfion of principles and of feeling, we may display an extensive acquaintance with the technicalities of criticism and of art, but we need never aspire to that correct judgment and refined feeling, which raise the critic to the same rank with the original writer, and give him an equal claim to immortality.

CHAP. VII.

Miscellaneous Observations on the Proper Objects of Taste.

THE qualities that excite the emotion of sublimity in the mind, have been considered by most writers on the subject, as proper objects of taste; and, accordingly, they have extended its province to an acquaintance with all the qualities that enter into our ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. To the sense of beauty and sublimity, some writers have added the sense of novelty, of imitation, of harmony, of ridicule, and of virtue. I have confined it to the sense of beauty alone, and in doing so, I have been determined by the following reflections. Imitation, harmony, ridicule, and virtue, are only different species of beauty, and must necessarily be treated of under that head. The sense of novelty is, I apprehend, a sense which we do not possess. We may form an idea of novelty, but we have no sense of it. When a new object is presented to us, it is the object itself that affects us, and not the abstract idea of novelty; for if we were moved only by

the novelty of the object, all new objects would affect us alike. This is never the case-every object affects us by its own distinct qualities, and therefore we experience a very different emotion when we first see a tiger or an elephant, from what we felt when we first gazed upon a dove or a butterfly. Our feelings are entirely engrossed by the appearance of the object itself, not by the reflection that we have never seen it before. This reflection may not occur to us at all, and therefore it does not necessarily enter into the sensation of the moment; whereas the sensation produced by the object itself, is irresistible, and always determined by its proper nature. The reflection that we never saw it before, is not a feeling or sensation, but an act of the understanding; but the impression made by the object is not an act, but a passion. It is a change produced in our feelings, not by any act of our own, but by the appearance of the object, so that, with regard to the impression, we are perfectly passive. A novel object, then, is pleasing, or disagreeable, on the same principle with objects with which we are long acquainted. The qualities that please in the one are the same that please in the other; and it is only these qualities that the connoisseur or critical judge takes into consideration, when he points out the beauty or ugliness of a novel object. The judgments of a