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, have 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 humanised, 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;--for in its intercourse with
these t