member, that the word beautiful always implies some comparison. The prose of Bunyan is agreeable to me till I have read that of Dryden; Dryden's, till I am familiarized to the works of Addison. The arrantest daub in painting may appear agreeable to me, till I have seen the masters in the Flemish school; and I cease to admire these latter when I am become acquainted with the great Italian pictures. The very term beautiful implies something superior to common effects; and therefore we require in a judge of the beautiful, that from experience he should have ascertained what is a common effect, what not. A man who has seen very few pictures, is a bad judge of any single picture, because, though he can tell whether he is pleased or not, he can not tell whether he is pleased more or less than he should be by pictures in general. Therefore, in addition to candor, a judge of the beautiful must have experience; and he must also have delicacy of feeling: a man may reason himself out of this feeling of beauty, or reason himself into it; but, after all, the thing is a matter of feeling, and there are some men of such metallic nerves, and blunt entrails, that Milton could never have written them into sublimity, or Michael Angelo painted them into emotion of course they can be no judges of the beautiful, any more than the blind can determine upon the diversity of colors. Wherever, then, the standard of any species of beauty is required, we may safely say it rests in the opinion of candid men, of men who have had experience in that department of beauty, who have feeling for it, and who have competent understandings to judge of the design and reasoning, which are always the highest and most excellent of all beauties. Such men, where they are to be found, form the standard in every department of beauty, and in every ingredient of taste. How such critics are to be found, is another question: that they exist, no man doubts; and their joint influence ultimately prevails, and gives the law to public opinion. But I hear some men asking where they are to be found? and who they are? with a sort of exultation, as if there were any wit, or talent, or importance, in the question. They are to be found in Dover Street, Albemarle Street, Berkeley Square, the Temple; anywhere wherever reading, thinking men, who have seen a great deal of the world, are to be found. I myself could mention the names of twenty persons, whose opinions influence the public taste in this town; and then, when opinions are settled here, those opinions go down by the mail-coach, to regulate all matters of taste for the provinces. The progress of good taste, however, though it is certain and irresistible, is slow. Mistaken pleasantry, false ornament, and affected conceit, perish by the discriminating hand of time, that lifts up from the dust of oblivion, the grand and simple efforts of genius. Title, rank, prejudice, party, artifice, and a thousand disturbing forces, are always at work to confer unmerited fame; but every recurring year contributes its remedy to these infringements on justice and good sense. The breath of living acclamation can not reach the ages which are to come the judges and the judged are no more; passion is extinguished; party is forgotten: and the mild yet inflexible decisions of taste, will receive nothing, as the price of praise, but the solid exertions of superior talent. Justice is pleasant, even when she destroys. It is a grateful homage to common sense, to see those productions hastening to that oblivion, in their progress to which they should never have been retarded. But it is much more pleasant to witness the power of taste in the work of preservation and lasting praise ;-to think that, in these fleeting and evanescent feelings of the beautiful and the sublime, men have discovered something as fixed and as positive, as if they were measuring the flow of the tides, or weighing the stones on which they tread-to think that there lives not, in the civilized world, a being who knows he has a mind, and who knows not that Virgil and Homer have written, that Raffaelle has painted, and that Tully has spoken. Intrenched in these everlasting bulwarks against barbarism, Taste points out to the races of men, as they spring up in the order of time, on what path they shall guide the labors of the human spirit. Here she is safe; hence she never can be driven, while one atom of matter clings to another, and till man, with all his wonderful system of feeling and thought, is called away to Him who is the great Author of all that is beautiful, and all that is sublime, and all that is good! LECTURE XIII ON THE BEAUTIFUL. THE three next lectures which I propose to deliver in this place, will be on the same subject as that with which I am at present engaged (the Beautiful). I have found it quite impossible to compress this very ample subject into a less space; and even with such limits I have been compelled to pass over many topics of discussion with a brevity very ill suited to their importance, and little favorable to perspicuity. I mention the length to which I intend to carry this discussion, lest any one should conceive, after I had finished this lecture, that I had done with the subject, and consequently had treated it very jejunely and imperfectly that I shall treat it imperfectly enough at last, I can easily believe; but still I prefer to be judged after I am heard, rather than before. The best evidence we can procure of the resemblance of our feelings, is by language. When men give one common name to very dissimilar objects, it is most probable that they give it because these objects, though apparently dissimilar, produce effects upon the mind which materially resemble each other: therefore, the mode in which I propose to examine the nature of the beautiful, is, first, to state the fact with respect to language, the various classes of objects and occasions where a person understanding his own language thoroughly, and applying it properly, would use the expression of beautiful. In the first place, it is applied to the simplest sensations of sight, as color, figure, and so forth; it is applied to sounds, either simple or compound; but, I believe, neither to touch, taste, nor smell. We should not say that the feeling of velvet, or the taste of sugar, or the smell of a rose, was beautiful: the latter instance, however, is rather doubtful; if the expression be not already legitimated, I think we may say it will be so very soon. We apply the expression to the face of nature, to landscape, to personal appearance, to animals, to poetry, painting, sculpture, and all the fine arts which are called mimetic, and represent animate or inanimate nature. We apply it to several moral feelings of the mind, to architecture, and to invention in machinery. These are, I fancy, the principal subjects which justify the application of the word. There is one usage of the word to which I shall not refer in the subsequent discussion, because it is evidently used in a figurative sense; as when we say that any thing which is good, is beautiful; and in this sense we should say that Milton's description of the falling angels was beautiful, though in strictness it is sublime, and not beautiful: "Him the Almighty Power Hurl'd headlong flaming from the ethereal sky, To bottomless perdition; there to dwell In adamantine chains and penal fire, Who durst defy the Omnipotent to arms. Nine times the space that measures day and night Lay vanquish'd, rolling in the fiery gulf, Reserv'd him to more wrath; for now the thought Torments him; round he throws his baleful eyes, As one great furnace flam'd; yet from those flames Serv'd only to discover sights of woe, Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace With ever-burning sulphur unconsum'd.” But the word beautiful, as a general word for excellence, is a part of that practice in language, which, where there |