Dr. Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTURE II. TASTE. Taste is "the power of receiving pleasure or pain from the beauties or deformities of nature and of art." It is a faculty common in some degree to all men. Through the circle of human nature, nothing is more general, than the relish of beauty of one kind or other; of what is orderly, proportioned, grand, harmonious, new, or sprightly. Nor does there prevail less generally a disrelish of whatever is gross, dispro- portioned, disorderly, and discordant. In children the rudiments of taste appear very early in a thousand instances; in their partiality for regular bodies, their fondness for pictures and statues, and their warm attachment to whatever is new or astonishing. The most stupid peasants receive pleasure from talesand ballads, and are delighted with.the beautiful appearances of nature in the earth and heavens. Even in the deserts of America, where human nature appears in its most uncultivated state, the savages have their ornaments of dress, their war and their death songs, their harangues and their orators. The principles of taste must therefore be deeply founded in the human mind. To have some discernment of beauty is no less essential to man, than to possess the attributes of speech and reason. Though no human being can be entirely devoid of this faculty, yet it is possessed in very different degrees. In some men only faint glimmerings of taste are visible; the beauties which they relish are of ths What is the subject of this lecture What is taste Is it common to all men What do men relish What do they disrelish How do the rudiments of taste appear in children How does taste appear in peasants How in savages What must we conclude therefore ? - How is this faculty possessed among men! coarsest kind; and of these they have on...