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Every one, therefore, ought to fix some measure of beauty, before he grows eloquent on the subject. Every thing seems to derive it's pretensions to beauty, on account of it's colour, smoothness, variety, uniformity, partial resemblance to something else, proportion, or suitableness to the end proposed, some connection of ideas, or a mixture of all these.

As to the beauty of colours, their present effect seems in proportion to their impulse; and scarlet, were it not for habit, would affect an Indian before all other colours. Resemblances wrought by art; pictures, bustoes, statues, please. Columns, proportioned to their incumbent weight; but herein we suppose homogeneous materials; it is otherwise, in case we know that a column is made of iron.

Habit, herein, seems to have an influence to which we can afix no bounds. Suppose the generality of mankind formed with a mouth from ear to ear, and that it were requisite, in point of respiration would not the present make of mouths have subjected a man to the name of Bocha Chica?

able, that a clown would require more Chloe's face, than a courtier.

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daily the strange effects of habit, in respect of fashi

on. To what colours, or proportions, does it not reconcile us! Conceit is false taste; and very widely different from no taste at all. Beauty of person should, perhaps, be estimated according to the proportion it bears to such a make and features as are most likely to produce the love of the opposite sex. The look of dignity, the look of wisdom, the look of delicacy and refinement, seem, in some measure, foreign. Perhaps, the appearance of sensibility may be one ingredient; and that of health, anoth

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At least, a cadaverous countenance is the most disgusting in the world. I know not, if one reason of the different opinions concerning beauty be not owing to self-love. People are apt to form some criterion, from their own persons, or possessions. A tall person approves the look of a folio or octavo : a square thick-set man is more delighted with a quar-, This instance, at least, may serve to explain what I intend. I believe, it sometimes happens that a person may have what the artists call an ear and an eye, without taste: for instance, a man may sometimes have a quickness in distinguishing the similitude or difference of lines and sounds, without any skill to give the proper preference betwixt the combinations of them. Taste produces different effects on different complexions. It consists, as I have often observed, in the appetite and the discernment; then most properly so called, when they are united in equal proportions. Where the

discernment is predominant, a person is pleased with fewer objects, and requires perfection in what he sees. Where the appetite prevails, he is so much attached to beauty, that he feels a gratification in every degree in which it is manifested. I frankly own myself to be of this latter class: I love painting and statuary so well, as to be not undelighted with moderate performances. The reason people vary in their opinions of a portrait, I mean with regard to the resemblance it bears to the original, seems no other than that they lay stress on different features in the original; and this different stress is owing to different complexions of mind. People of little or no taste commend a person for it's corpulency. I cannot see, why an excrescence of belly, cheek, or chin,

should be deemed more beautiful than a wen upon any other part of the body. Through a connection of ideas, it may form the beauty of a pig or an ox.

There seems a pretty exact analogy between the objects, and the senses. Some tunes, some tastes, some visible objects, please at first, and that only; others, only by degrees, and then long-(Raspberry-jellygreen-tea-Alley-Croaker-Air in Ariadne a baron's robe-and a bishop's lawn). Perhaps, some of these instances may be ill enough chosen; but the thing is true. Tunes, with words, please me the more in proportion as they approach nearer to the natural accent of the words to which they are assigned. Scotch tunes often end high; their language does the same. To how very great a degree the appearance of health alone is beauty, I am not able to determine. I presume the most regular and well-proportioned form of limbs and features is, at the same time, the most healthful one: the fittest to perform the functions and operations of the body. If so, a perfectly healthful form is a perfectly beautiful form.-Health is beauty, and the most perfect health is the most perfect beauty. To have recourse to experience: the most sickly and cadaverous countenance is the least provocate to love; or rather the most inconsistent with it. A florid look to appear beautiful, must be the bloom of health, and not the glow of a fever. An obvious connection may be traced betwixt moral and physical beauty; the love of symmetry and the love of virtue; an elegant taste and perfect honesty. We may, we must, rise from the love of natural to that of moral beauty: such is the conclusion of Plato, and of my Lord Shaftesbury. Wherever there is a want of

taste, we generally observe a love of money, and cunning and whenever taste prevails, a want of prudence, and an utter disregard to money.

Taste (or a just relish of beauty) seems to distinguish us from the brute creation, as much as intellect, or reason. We do not find that brutes have any sensation of this sort. A bull is goaded by the love of sex in general, without the least appearance of any distinction in favour of the more beautiful individual. Accordingly men devoid of taste are in a great meas, ure indifferent as to make, complexion, features; and find a difference of sex sufficient to excite their passion in all it's fervor. It is not thus where there is a taste for beauty, either accurate or erroneous. The person of a good taste requires real beauty in the object of his passion; and the person of bad taste requires something which he substitutes in the place of beauty. Persons of taste, it has been asserted, are also the best qualified to distinguish, and the most prone to admire, moral virtue: nor does it invalidate this maxim, that their practice does not correspond. The power of acting virtuously depends, in a great measure, on withstanding a present, and, perhaps, sensual gratification, for the sake of a more distant and intellectual satisfaction. Now, as persons of fine taste are men of the strongest sensual appetites, it happens that in balancing present and future, they are apt enough to allow an unreasonable advantage to the former. On the other hand, a more phlegmatic character may, with no greater self-denial, allow the future fairer play. But let us wave the merely sensual indulgences; and let us consider the man of taste in regard to points of meum and tuum; in regard to the virtues of forgiveness; in re

gard to charity, compassion, munificence, and magnanimity; and we cannot fail to vote his taste the glorious triumph which it deserves. There is

a kind of counter-taste, founded on surprise and curiosity which maintains a sort of rivalship with the true; and may be expressed by the name Concetto. Such is the fondness of some persons for a knife-haft made from the royal oak, or a tobacco-stopper from a mulberry-tree of Shakespeare's own planting. It gratifies an empty curiosity. Such is the casual resemblance of Apollo and the nine muses in a piece of agate; a dog expressed in feathers, or a woodcock in mohair. They serve to give surprise. But a just fancy will no more esteem a picture because it proves to be produced by shells, than a writer would prefer a pen because a person made it with his toes. In all such cases difficulty should not be allowed to give a casting weight; nor a needle be considered as a painter's instrument when he is so much better furnished with a pencil.* Perhaps, no print, nor even painting, is capable of producing a figure answerable to the idea which poetry or history has given us of great men a Cicero, for instance, a Homer, a Cato, or an Alexander. The same, perhaps, is true of the grandeur of some ancient buildings.—And the reason is, that the effects of a pencil are distinct and limited, whereas the descriptions of the pen leave the imagination room to expatiate; and Burke has made it extremely obvious, that indistinctness of outline is one source of the sublime. What an absurd

* Cornelius Ketel, born at Gonda, in 1548; landed in England 1573; settled at Amsterdam 1581; took it into his head to grow famous by painting with his fingers instead of pencils. The whim took.-His suc cess increased.-His fingers appearing too easy tools, he then undertook to paint with his feet. See H. Walpole's "Book of Painters."

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