ssano we may add Paul Veronese and Tintoret, for their entire
inattention to what is justly esteemed the most essential part of our
art, the expression of the passions. Notwithstanding these glaring
deficiencies, we justly esteem their works; but it must be remembered
that they do not please from those defects, but from their great
excellences of another kind, and in spite of such transgressions. These
excellences, too, as far as they go, are founded in the truth of general
nature. They tell the truth, though not the whole truth.

By these considerations, which can never be too frequently impressed, may
be obviated two errors which I observed to have been, formerly at least,
the most prevalent, and to be most injurious to artists: that of thinking
taste and genius to have nothing to do with reason, and that of taking
particular living objects for nature.

I shall now say something on that part of taste which, as I have hinted
to you before, does not belong so much to the external form of things,
but is addressed to the mind, and depends on its original frame, or, to
use the expression, the organisation of the soul; I mean the imagination
and the passions. The principles of these are as invariable as the
former, and are to be known and reasoned upon in the same manner, by an
appeal to common sense deciding upon the common feelings of mankind. This
sense, and these feelings, appear to me of equal authority, and equally
conclusive.

Now this appeal implies a general uniformity and agreement in the minds
of men. It would be else an idle and vain endeavour to establish rules
of art; it would be pursuing a phantom to attempt to move affections with
which we were entirely unacquainted. We have no reason to suspect there
is a greater difference between our minds than between our forms, of
which, though there are no two alike, yet there is a general similitude
that goes through the whole race of mankind; and those who have
cultivated their taste can distinguish what is beautiful or deformed, or,
in other words, what agrees with or what deviates from the general idea
of nature, in one case as well as in the other.

The internal fabric of our mind, as well as the external form of our
bodies, being nearly uniform, it seems then to follow, of course, that as
the imagination is incapable of producing anything originally of itself,
and can only vary and combine these ideas with which it is furnished by
means of the senses, t