Ariosto, while admitting his charm on the next, having thus set up the idol again, he proceeds once more to lop it of hands and feet and tumble it off its throne by saying that “if things are found to please, they cannot be faults; let the pleasure which they produce be ever so unexpected and unaccountable.” The most dishevelled of Romantics, in the reddest of waistcoats, could say no more. In his remarks upon the qualifications and functions of the critic, Hume’s anthropological and psychological mastery is evident enough: but it is at least equally evident that his actual taste in literature was in no sense spontaneous, original, or energetic. In comparing him, say, with Johnson it is not a little amusing to find his much greater acquiescence in the conventional and traditional judgments. Indeed, towards the end of his Essay[308] Hume anticipates a later expression[309] of a perennial attitude of mind by declaring, “However I may excuse the poet on account of the manners of his age, I never can relish the composition,” and by complaining of the want of “humanity and decency so conspicuous” even sometimes in Homer and the Greek tragedies. That David, of all persons, should fail to realise—he did _not_ fail to perceive—that the humanity of Homer _was_ human and the decency of Sophocles _was_ decent, is indeed surprising. [Sidenote: _His inconsistency._] Such things might at first sight not quite dispose one to regret that, as he himself remarks,[310] “the critics who have had some tincture of philosophy” have been “few,” for certainly those who have had more tincture of philosophy than Hume himself have been far fewer. But, as is usually the case,[311] it is not the fault of philosophy at all. For some reason, natural disposition, or want of disposition, or even that necessity of clinging to _some_ convention which has been remarked in Voltaire himself, evidently made Hume a mere “church-going bell”—pulled by the established vergers, and summoning the faithful to orthodox worship—in most of his literary utterances. Yet, as we have seen, he could not help turning quite a different tune at times, though he himself hardly knew it. [Sidenote: _Burke on the Sublime and Beautiful._]