umptions of Shaftesbury
and Hutcheson. His work was primarily a popularization of their ideas,
and, in its enthusiastic language, its emphasis on sensibility,
and its epistolary form, it seems directed at flattering a female
audience. Armstrong's remarks on taste, written in imitation of
the simplicity and clarity of the rational tradition, are personal
assertions and opinions rather than well-defined or clearly
thought-out critical positions. They are random thoughts rather than a
coherent critical theory.

The significance of Cooper and Armstrong rests, therefore, on certain
representative attitudes toward taste which exhibit the change
"from classic to romantic." On the one hand, they accept the moral
postulates of art, and, on the other, they emphasize the emotional
basis of taste. Cooper treats art as a secondary form of knowledge,
yet emphasizes the thrill that art gives. Armstrong accepts
the standards of clarity and simplicity, while emphasizing the
individuality of response and the need for discriminating particular,
rather than general, qualities. Though Cooper and Armstrong fail to
revaluate the traditions they accept, they exemplify trends which
led others to perform this revaluation and to transform the moral
assumptions into aesthetic criteria.

Bibliographical Note

The two reprints from the twenty letters of John Gilbert Cooper's
_Letters concerning Taste. To which are added Essays on similar and
other Subjects_ are from the third edition, dated 1757; the first
edition was published in 1755 as _Letters concerning Taste_.
The selections by John Armstrong are taken from the two-volume
_Miscellanies_ published in 1770. "The Taste of the Present Age"
received its first publication in this edition, but the other prose
had previously been published in 1758 under the pseudonym of Launcelot
Temple in the first volume of _Sketches: or Essays on Various
Subjects_. The poem _Taste: An Epistle to a Young Critic_ was first
published in 1753.

Ralph Cohen

LETTERS CONCERNING TASTE.

LETTER I.

To EUPHEMIUS.

Whence comes it, EUPHEMIUS, that you, who are _feelingly_ alive to
each fine Sensation that Beauty or Harmony gives the Soul, should so
often assert, contrary to what you daily experience, _that_ TASTE _is
governed by Caprice, and that_ BEAUTY _is reducible to no Criterion?_
I am afraid your Generosity in this Instance is greater than your
Sincerity, and that you are willing to compl