and a breathless palpitation of the heart, (like the ruffling of the feathers of the robin-redbreast), which completely gave back all the uneasy and thrilling voluptuousness of the sentiment; and I contend that the person on whom not a particle of this expression was lost, (or would have been lost, if it had even been finer), into whom the tones of sweetness or tenderness sink deeper and deeper as they approach the farthest verge of ecstacy or agony, he who has an ear attuned to the trembling harmony, and a heart pierceable' by pleasure's finest point, is the best judge of music,-not he who remains insensible to the matter himself, or, if you point it out to him, asks, What of it?' I fancied that I had a triumph some time ago, over a critic and connoisseur of music, who thought little of the minuet in Don Giovanni; but the same person redeemed his pretensions to musical taste in my opinion by saying of some passage in Mozart, This is a soliloquy equal to any in Hamlet.' In hearing the accompaniment in the Messiah of angels' voices to the shepherds keeping watch at night, who has the most taste and delicacy, he who listens in silent rapture to the silver sounds, as they rise in sweetness and soften into distance, drawing the soul from earth to heaven, and making it partaker of the music of the spheres, or he who remains deaf to the summons, and remarks that it is an allegorical conceit? Which would Handel have been most pleased with, the man who was seen standing at the performance of the Coronation anthem in Westminster Abbey, with his face bathed in tears, and mingling the drops which sacred joy had engendered' with that ocean of circling sound, or with him who sat with frigid, critical aspect, his heart untouched and his looks unaltered as the marble statue on the wall? 1 Again, if any one, in looking at Rembrandt's picture of Jacob's Dream, should not be struck with the solemn awe that surrounds it, and with the dazzling flights of angels' wings like steps of golden light, emanations of flame or spirit hovering between earth and sky, and should observe very wisely that Jacob was thrown in one corner of the picture like a bundle of clothes, without power, form, or motion, and should think this a defect, I should say that such a critic might possess great knowledge of the mechanical part of painting, but 1 It is a fashion among the scientific or pedantic part of the musical world to decry Miss Stephens's singing as feeble and insipid. This it is to take things by their contraries. Her excellence does not lie in force or contrast, but in sweetness and simplicity. To give only one instance. Any person who does not feel the beauty of her singing the lines in Artaxerxes, 'What was my pride is now my shame,' &c., in which the notes seem to fall from her lips like languid drops from the bending flower, and her voice flutters and dies away with the expiring conflict of passion in her bosom, may console himself with the possession of other faculties, but assuredly he has no ear for music. not an atom of feeling or imagination. Or who is it that, in looking at the productions of Raphael or Titian, is the person of true taste? He who finds what there is, or he who finds what there is not in each? Not he who picks a petty vulgar quarrel with the colouring of Raphael or the drawing of Titian is the true critic and judicious spectator, but he who broods over the expression of the one till it takes possession of his soul, and who dwells on the tones and hues of the other till his eye is saturated with truth and beauty, for by this means he moulds his mind to the study and reception of what is most perfect in form and colour, instead of letting it remain empty, 'swept and garnished,' or rather a dull blank, with knowledge at each entrance quite shut out.' He who cavils at the want of drawing in Titian is not the most sensible to it in Raphael; instead of that, he only insists on his want of colouring. He who is offended at Raphael's hardness and monotony is not delighted with the soft, rich pencilling of Titian; he only takes care to find fault with him for wanting that which, if he possessed it in the highest degree, he would not admire or understand. And this is easy to be accounted for. First, such a critic has been told what to do, and follows his instructions. Secondly, to perceive the height of any excellence, it is necessary to have the most exquisite sense of that kind of excellence through all its gradations to perceive the want of any excellence, it is merely necessary to have a negative or abstract notion of the thing, or perhaps only of Or, in other words, any the most crude and mechanical idea of a given quality is a measure of positive deficiency, whereas none but the most refined idea of the same quality can be a standard of superlative merit. To distinguish the finest characteristics of Titian or Raphael, to go along with them in their imitation of Nature, is to be so far like them: to be occupied only with that in which they fell short of others, instead of that in which they soared above them, shows a vulgar, narrow capacity, insensible to any thing beyond mediocrity, and an ambition still more grovelling. To be dazzled by admiration of the greatest excellence, and of the highest works of genius, is natural to the best capacities, and the best natures; envy and dulness are most apt to detect minute blemishes and unavoidable inequalities, as we see the spots in the sun by having its rays the name. 1 There is a very striking and spirited picture of this subject by an ingenious living artist (Mr. Alston), in the present exhibition of the Royal Academy. The academic skill in it is admirable, and many of the forms are truly elegant and beautiful; but I may be permitted to add, that the scene (as he represents it) too much resembles the courtly designs of Vitruvius or Palladio, rather than 'a temple not made with hands, eternal in the heavens'; and that the angels seem rather preparing to dance a minuet or grand ballet on the marble pavement which they tread, than descending the air in a dream of love, of hope, and gratitude. blunted by mist or smoke. It may be asked, then, whether mere extravagance and enthusiasm are proofs of taste? And I answer, no, where they are without reason and knowledge. Mere sensibility is not true taste, but sensibility to real excellence is. To admire and be wrapt up in what is trifling or absurd, is a proof of nothing but ignorance or affectation: on the contrary, he who admires most what is most worthy of admiration, (let his raptures or his eagerness to express them be what they may), shows himself neither extravagant nor 'unwise.' When Mr. Wordsworth once said that he could read the description of Satan in Milton, 'Nor seem'd Less than archangel ruin'd, and the excess till he felt a certain faintness come over his mind from a sense of beauty and grandeur, I saw no extravagance in this, but the utmost truth of feeling. When the same author, or his friend Mr. Southey, says, that the Excursion is better worth preserving than the Paradise Lost, this appears to me, I confess, a great piece of impertinence, or an unwarrantable stretch of friendship. Nor do I think the preference given by certain celebrated reviewers, of Mr. Rogers's Human Life over Mr. Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads, founded on the true principles of poetical justice; for something is, after all, better than nothing. To hasten to a conclusion of these desultory observations. The highest taste is shown in habitual sensibility to the greatest beauties; the most general taste is shown in a perception of the greatest variety of excellence. Many people admire Milton, and as many admire Pope, while there are but few who have any relish for both. Almost all the disputes on this subject arise, not so much from false, as from confined taste. We suppose that only one thing can have merit; and that, if we allow it to any thing else, we deprive the favourite object of our critical faith of the honours due to it. We are generally right in what we approve ourselves; for liking proceeds from a certain conformity of objects to the taste; as we are generally wrong in condemning what others admire; for our dislike mostly proceeds from our want of taste for what pleases them. Our being totally senseless to what excites extreme delight in those who have as good a right to judge as we have, in all human probability implies a defect of faculty in us, rather than a limitation in the resources of nature or art. Those who are pleased with the fewest things, know the least; as those who are pleased with every thing, know nothing. Shakespeare makes Mrs. Quickly say of Falstaff, by a pleasant blunder, that Carnation was a colour he could never abide.' So there are persons who cannot like Claude, because he is not Salvator Rosa; some who cannot endure Rembrandt, and others who would not cross the street to see a Vandyke; one reader does not like the neatness of Junius, and another objects to the extravagance of Burke; and they are all right, if they expect to find in others what is only to be found in their favourite author or artist, but equally wrong if they mean to say, that each of those they would condemn by a narrow and arbitrary standard of taste, has not a peculiar and transcendent merit of his own. The question is not, whether you like a certain excellence, (it is your own fault if you do not), but whether another possessed it in a very eminent degree. If he did not, who is there that possessed it in a greater that ranks above him in that particular? Those who are accounted the best, are the best in their line. When we say that Rembrandt was a master of chiaro-scuro, for instance, we do not say that he joined to this the symmetry of the Greek statues, but we mean that we must go to him for the perfection of chiaro-scuro, and that a Greek statue has not chiaro-scuro. If any one objects to Junius's Letters, that they are a tissue of epigrams, we answer, Be it so; it is for that very reason that we admire them. Again, should any one find fault with Mr. Burke's writings as a collection of rhapsodies, the proper answer always would be, Who is there that has written finer rhapsodies? I know an admirer of Don Quixote who can see no merit in Gil Blas, and an admirer of Gil Blas who could never get through Don Quixote. I myself have great pleasure in reading both these works, and in that respect think I have an advantage over both these critics. It always struck me as a singular proof of good taste, good sense, and liberal thinking, in an old friend, who had Paine's Rights of Man and Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution, bound up in one volume, and who said, that, both together, they made a very good book. To agree with the greatest number of good judges, is to be in the right; and good judges are persons of natural sensibility and acquired knowledge.1 On the other hand, it must be owned, there are critics whose praise is a libel, and whose recommendation of any work is enough to condemn it. Men of the greatest genius and originality are not always persons of the most liberal and unprejudiced taste; they have a strong bias to certain qualities themselves, are for reducing others to their own standard, and lie less open to the general impressions of things. This exclusive preference of their own peculiar excellencies 1 I apprehend that natural is of more importance than acquired sensibility. Thus, any one, without having been at an opera, may judge of opera dancing, only from having seen (with judicious eyes) a stag bound across a lawn, or a tree wave its branches in the air. In all, the general principles of motion are the same. to those of others, in writers whose merits have not been sufficiently understood or acknowledged by their contemporaries, chiefly because they were not common-place, may sometimes be seen mounting up to a degree of bigotry and intolerance, little short of insanity. There are some critics I have known who never allow an author any merit till all the world cry out upon him,' and others who never allow another any merit that any one can discover but themselves. So there are connoisseurs who spend their lives and waste their breath in extolling sublime passages in obscure writers, and lovers who choose their mistresses for their ugly faces. This is not taste, but affectation. What is popular is not necessarily vulgar; and that which we try to rescue from fatal obscurity, had in general much better remain in it. THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED TASTE relates to that which, either in the objects of nature, or the imitation of them or the Fine Arts in general is calculated to give pleasure. Now, to know what is calculated to give pleasure, the way is to enquire what does give pleasure: so that taste is, after all, much more a matter of fact and less of theory than might be imagined. We may hence determine another point, viz.-whether there is any universal or exclusive standard of taste, since this is to inquire, in other words, whether there is any one thing that pleases all the world alike, or whether there is only one thing that pleases anybody, both which questions carry their own answers with them. Still it does not follow, because there is no dogmatic or bigoted standard of taste, like a formula of faith, which whoever does not believe without doubt he shall be damned everlastingly, that there is no standard of taste whatever, that is to say, that certain things are not more apt to please than others, that some do not please more generally, that there are not others that give most pleasure to those who have studied the subject, that one nation is most susceptible of a particular kind of beauty, and another of another, according to their characters, &c. It would be a difficult attempt to force all these into one general rule or system, and yet equally so to deny that they are absolutely capricious, and without any foundation or principle whatever. There are, doubtless, books for children that we discard as we grow up; yet, what are the majority of mankind, or even readers, but grown children? If put to the vote of all the milliners' girls in London, Old Mortality, or even Heart of Midlothian, would not carry the day (or, at least, not very triumphantly) over a common Minerva-press novel; and I will hazard another opinion, that no |