oad:--he will be in the condition of Hannibal among the
Alps.

And where lies the real difficulty of creating that taste by which a
truly original poet is to be relished? Is it in breaking the bonds
of custom, in overcoming the prejudices of false refinement, and
displacing the aversions of inexperience? Or, if he labour for an
object which here and elsewhere I have proposed to myself, does it
consist in divesting the reader of the pride that induces him to dwell
upon those points wherein men differ from each other, to the exclusion
of those in which all men are alike, or the same; and in making him
ashamed of the vanity that renders him insensible of the appropriate
excellence which civil arrangements, less unjust than might appear,
and Nature illimitable in her bounty, had conferred on men who may
stand below him in the scale of society? Finally, does it lie in
establishing that dominion over the spirits of readers by which they
are to be humbled and humanized, in order that they may be purified
and exalted?

If these ends are to be attained by the mere communication of
_knowledge_, it does _not_ lie here.--TASTE, I would remind the
reader, like IMAGINATION, is a word which has been forced to extend
its services far beyond the point to which philosophy would have
confined them. It is a metaphor, taken from a _passive_ sense of the
human body, and transferred to things which are in their essence
_not_ passive,--to intellectual _acts_ and _operations_. The word,
Imagination, has been overstrained, from impulses honourable to
mankind, to meet the demands of the faculty which is perhaps the
noblest of our nature. In the instance of Taste, the process has been
reversed; and from the prevalence of dispositions at once injurious
and discreditable, being no other than that selfishness which is the
child of apathy,--which, as Nations decline in productive and creative
power, makes them value themselves upon a presumed refinement of
judging. Poverty of language is the primary cause of the use which we
make of the word, Imagination; but the word, Taste, has been
stretched to the sense which it bears in modern Europe by habits of
self-conceit, inducing that inversion in the order of things whereby a
passive faculty is made paramount among the faculties conversant with
the fine arts. Proportion and congruity, the requisite knowledge
being supposed, are subjects upon which taste may be trusted; it is
competent to this office--fo