16. Taste is the legitimate offspring of nature, educated by propriety: fashion is the bastard of vanity, dressed by art.
17. The immediate operation of taste is to ascertain the kind; the next, to appreciate the degrees of excellence.
Coroll.—Taste, founded on sense and elegance of mind, is reared by culture, invigorated by practice and comparison: scantiness stops short of it; fashion adulterates it: it is shackled by pedantry, and overwhelmed by luxuriance.
Taste sheds a ray over the homeliest or the most uncouth subject. Fashion frequently flattens the elegant, the gentle, and the great, into one lumpy mass of disgust.
If "foul and fair" be all that your gross-spun sense discerns, if you are blind to the intermediate degrees of excellence, you may perhaps be a great man—a senator—a conqueror; but if you respect yourself, never presume to utter a syllable on works of taste.
18. If mind and organs conspire to qualify you for a judge in works of taste, remember that you are to be possessed of three things—the subject of the work which you are to examine; the character of the artist as such; and, before all, of impartiality.