nce to discover the
real nature of the ideas thus expressed.

Sec. 2. How referable to temporary fashions.

Something of the peculiar meaning of the words is referable to the
authority of fashion and the exclusiveness of pride, owing to which that
which is the mode of a particular time is submissively esteemed, and
that which by its costliness or its rarity is of difficult attainment,
or in any way appears to have been chosen as the best of many things,
(which is the original sense of the words elegant and exquisite,) is
esteemed for the witness it bears to the dignity of the chooser.

But neither of these ideas are in any way connected with eternal beauty,
neither do they at all account for that agreeableness of color and form
which is especially termed chasteness, and which it would seem to be a
characteristic of rightly trained mind in all things to prefer, and of
common minds to reject.

Sec. 3. How to the perception of completion.

Sec. 4. Finish, by great masters esteemed essential.

There is however another character of artificial productions, to which
these terms have partial reference, which it is of some importance to
note, that of finish, exactness, or refinement, which are commonly
desired in the works of men, owing both to their difficulty of
accomplishment and consequent expression of care and power (compare
Chapter on Ideas of Power, Part I. Sect, i.,) and from their greater
resemblance to the working of God, whose "absolute exactness," says
Hooker, "all things imitate, by tending to that which is most exquisite
in every particular." And there is not a greater sign of the
imperfection of general taste, than its capability of contentment with
forms and things which, professing completion, are yet not exact nor
complete, as in the vulgar with wax and clay and china figures, and in
bad sculptors with an unfinished and clay-like modelling of surface, and
curves and angles of no precision or delicacy; and in general, in all
common and unthinking persons with an imperfect rendering of that which
might be pure and fine, as church-wardens are content to lose the sharp
lines of stone carving under clogging obliterations of whitewash, and as
the modern Italians scrape away and polish white all the sharpness and
glory of the carvings on their old churches, as most miserably and
pitifully on St. Mark's at Venice, and the Baptisteries of Pistoja and
Pisa, and many others; so also the delight of vulgar painte