he human form, must improve in
some, if not in every part; to effect which, considered as mere form
only, rules will suffice, but, considered as grace, it must express a
sentiment that no rules can give!

That all feel the same sentiment of admiration for that which they
think the most perfect, however the objects may differ, has induced
some to believe that beauty is an arbitrary idea, and that it exists
only in the imagination! But does it follow, that, because it is not
possible for the savage or the man of taste to judge of any object
but as experience enables him to judge, that therefore there is no
preeminence in that form which is beauty to the one above that which
is beauty to the other?

Somewhere there must exist, whether perceived or not, the perfection,
or highest point of excellence of the human form respecting
proportion; and somewhere there must exist, or does at times exist,
the highest excellence of its expression, i.e. the moral charm of the
human countenance, _grace_.

The artist, who has only seen the beauty of his own nation, will from
that form his standard of perfection. But, when he comes to extend his
enquiry, when he has viewed the beauty of other nations, particularly
that form and that expression which the Grecian artists (who were
probably on a line with the Grecian philosophers) modelled from their
ideas of beauty! he will quit his partiality for the beauty of his own
country, and prefer that of the Grecian, which I imagine is preferable
to that of the whole world! The only criterion to prove it so, I mean
its form, would be to select from every nation the most perfect in it,
and from that number to choose the most perfect, were this possible
to be done, respecting the external form of beauty: it could not
respecting the internal expression of beauty, _grace_; for who shall
be the world's arbiter of the ne plus ultra of grace!

That the artists of all ages and of all nations have terminated their
enquiries after beauty in that of the Grecian form is the highest
proof that can be given of its superior excellence to that of all the
world!

Common form, as I have observed before, is so much nearer beauty than
deformity, that it is, in abstract idea, the model to compose beauty
of form from. The _universal_ appearance of nature is, to every eye,
right, fit, faultless, &c. therefore, if every part of the copy be the
same, particularly, I mean, in the _human_ form, beauty of form must
resu