tradesman
particularly desires to direct the public attention. We find our grocers
enshrined in temples whose columns are of canisters, and whose pinnacles
are of sugar-loaves. Our shoemakers shape their soles under Gothic
portals, with pendants of shoes, and canopies of Wellingtons; and our
cheesemongers will, we doubt not, soon follow the excellent example, by
raising shops the varied diameters of whose jointed columns, in their
address to the eye, shall awaken memories of Staffa, Paestum, and
Palmyra; and in their address to the tongue, shall arouse exquisite
associations of remembered flavor, Dutch, Stilton, and Strachino.

163. Now, this fit of taste on the part of our tradesmen is only a
coarse form of a disposition inherent in the human mind. Those objects
to which the eye has been most frequently accustomed, and among which
the intellect has formed its habits of action, and the soul its modes of
emotion, become agreeable to the thoughts, from their correspondence
with their prevailing cast, especially when the business of life has had
any relation to those objects; for it is in the habitual and necessary
occupation that the most painless hours of existence are passed:
whatever be the nature of that occupation, the memories belonging to it
will always be agreeable, and, therefore, the objects awakening such
memories will invariably be found beautiful, whatever their character or
form.

164. It is thus that taste is the child and the slave of memory; and
beauty is tested, not by any fixed standard, but by the chances of
association; so that in every domestic building evidence will be found
of the kind of life through which its owner has passed, in the operation
of the habits of mind which that life has induced. From the
superannuated coxswain, who plants his old ship's figure-head in his six
square feet of front garden at Bermondsey, to the retired noble, the
proud portal of whose mansion is surmounted by the broad shield and the
crested gryphon, we are all guided, in our purest conceptions, our most
ideal pursuit, of the beautiful, by remembrances of active occupation;
and by principles derived from industry regulate the fancies of our
repose.

165. It would be excessively interesting to follow out the investigation
of this subject more fully, and to show how the most refined pleasures,
the most delicate perceptions, of the creature who has been appointed to
eat bread by the sweat of his brow, are dependent u