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mental law; Fancy is the condition of the mind unbent, uncontrolled, and often lawless.

The Imagination soars when the intellectual powers are in full, strong, and healthful play. It is Fancy which directs our reveries, or is present in our dreams.

Imagination is oftenest linked with pure feeling; she observes and appreciates the closest and most pathetic resemblances or analogies; detects and loves beauty in its subtlest forms. Fancy only sports unfeeling with the resemblance of things, airy and fantastical.

Imagination is the close attendant, the inseparable friend of the tragic muse, while Fancy alone disports herself in the atmosphere of comedy.

In a word, Imagination, creative, elevated, serious, dignified, belongs to poetic genius, and opens to it a world of high and holy thought, and of perennial pleasures, into which Fancy never enters.

The glorious faculty assigned

To elevate the more than reasoning mind,

And colour life's dark cloud with orient rays;
Imagination is that sacred power,
Imagination lofty and refined.

Among the plays of Shakspeare, so often marked by exalted Imagination, the "Midsummer Night's Dream" is full of delicate as well as capricious

Fancy; while in Homer, the Imagination is far more abundant, making the Iliad original, lively, glowing, and natural.

Pope's "Rape of the Lock" has been regarded as the best illustration, in one poem, of the predominance of Fancy, filled as it is with the Rosicrucian spirits, sylphs, gnomes, and nymphs.

The Divina Commedia" of Dante, and the "Paradise Lost" of Milton, are full of fine imagination while the "Faerie Queen" of Spenser, and Shakspeare's "Tempest," are fine examples of the beautiful combination of the Imagination and the Fancy.

For a long time, and indeed until quite recently, these two words were regarded as exactly synonymous, and were so used constantly.

While this was a great error, it will still be evident that, in their relation to Rhetoric, Imagination and Fancy are both important; and that, while genius alone may be able to create with the imagination, it is the province of taste to judge of the fancy and the imagination as displayed in writing, and of the beauties and pleasures arising from both.

(19.) Taste.

We come now to a consideration of the meaning and the province of Taste.

Taste has been defined the faculty by which we discern and enjoy the beauties of Nature and Art.

Whether Taste be a single faculty in itself, or whether it be a combination of other faculties, is a question which mainly concerns Intellectual Philosophy; but that there is such a power of discriminating must be admitted by all. If this be admitted, it is unimportant whether it be a simple or a complex faculty.

This power is the universal gift of God to man, although in different degrees; thus, the coarse tastes of the savage differ from the refined tastes of civilized life; and yet all will agree that sugar is sweet, vinegar sour, light and gay colours pleasant to the eye.

It is by taste that we create our standards of judgment in art, as well as in the world around us.

If we seek for such a standard of rhetorical judgment we shall find it to be drawn from nature, and dependent, as are our standards in the other Arts, upon that natural faculty which we have called Taste.

This term Taste, it is evident, is used in a secondary meaning when applied to the pleasures of Imagination. It has been by some persons derived from the verb tango, to touch, and may thus be regarded as the effect produced by coming in contact with anything; but to us its primary meaning is the power of judging, by the palate, of the quality and nature of things which we eat and drink.

The process of its second application is an easy one; thus, a sweet food produces a pleasurable sensation upon the palate, analogous to that of a sweet sound upon the ear, or such as one whom we call a sweet person produces upon our hearts; we thus speak of the taste of the food, a taste for music, or a person so much to our taste; by an extension of this process, Taste is made to apply to works of literature and art in all their branches, including the pleasures of the Imagination, and, in especial, to Rhetoric, in its task of inventing, arranging, and expressing discourse.

The capability of being pleased or pained by the works of Nature and Art around us, has been justly called sensitiveness; it springs directly from the union of the mind and the conscience; and thus is brought to bear upon all forms in the physical and moral world. In the term mind we include both the reason and the imagination. In our effort to be clear and concise we have avoided technical phrases borrowed from mental philosophy, and have limited ourselves to the plainest language.

After our sensitiveness is thus attracted towards or repelled from the various objects and ideas which surround us, it is the province of Taste to tell us why we are thus influenced, and to discern the beauties and deformities of Nature and of Art, and to arrange them according to some scale or law of gradation. The question has often been asked-"Is

there any standard of Taste?—and so many have denied the existence of such a standard, that an adage was framed by the Latins, and has been retained to our own times as the summary settlement of this question- De gustibus non est disputandum:" There is no disputing about Tastes.

It is worth a remark, in illustration of the case before us, that, in general, adages and aphorisms are only one half true, and the other half grossly and fatally false. Take for example the false part of the common motto, "A penny saved is a penny got." It is easily shown, by instances from everyday life, that this has been productive of many other evils as great as spendthriftiness; perhaps its injury to mankind has been greater than its good. It has steeled the heart against the famishing orphan or the indigent widow, and buttoned the pocket over the "penny saved," as though it were a generous and praiseworthy act.

In the words of Thomson:

Here you a muck-worm of the town might see,

At his dull desk, amid his ledgers stalled,

Eat up with carking care and penury;

Most like to carcase parched on gallow-tree.

"A penny saved is a penny got:"

Firm to this scoundrel maxim keepeth he,

Ne of its rigour will he bate a jot,

Till it has quenched his fire and banished his pot.

CASTLE OF INDOLENCE.

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