The _Essay on Taste_, which was originally published in 1790, and which was sped on its way by Jeffrey’s Review (the original form of the reviewer’s own essay) in 1811, had reached its sixth edition in 1825, and was still an authority, though it must by that time have begun to seem not a little old-fashioned, to readers of Coleridge and Hazlitt. It is rather unfortunately “dated” by its style, which—even at its original date something of a survival—is of the old “elegant” but distinctly artificial type of Blair: and, as has been hinted already, it abuses that eighteenth-century weakness for substituting a “combined and permuted” paraphrase of the proposition for an argument in favour of the fact. There is a very fair amount of force in its associationist considerations, though, as with all the devotees of the Association principle down to Mill, the turning round of the key is too often taken as equivalent to the opening of the lock. But its main faults, in more special connection with our subject, are two. [Sidenote: _Its confusions_] The first is a constant confusion of Beauty or Sublimity with Interest. Alison exhausts himself in proving that the associations of youth, affection, &c., &c., cause _love_ of the object—a truth no doubt too often neglected by the Neo-classic tribe, but accepted and expressed by men of intelligence, from the Lucretian _usus concinnat_ down to Maginn’s excellent “Don’t let any fool tell you that you will get tired of your wife; you are much more likely to get quite unreasonably fond of her.” But love and admiration, though closely connected, are not the same thing, and love and interest are still farther apart. Another confusion of Alison’s, very germane indeed to our subject, is that he constantly mixes up the beauty of a thing with the beauty of the description of it. The most interesting point, however, about Alison is his halting between two opinions as to certain Neo-classic idols. His individual criticisms of literature are constantly vitiated by faults of the old arbitrariness, especially as to what is “low.” There is an astonishing lack of critical imagination in his objections to two Virgilian lines— “Adde tot egregias urbes, operumque laborem . . . . . . . . Septemque una sibi muro circumdedit arces”— as “cold,” “prosaic,” “tame,” “vulgar,” and “spiritless.” As if the image of the busy town after the country beauty were not the most poetic of contrasts in the first: and as if the City of the Seven Hills did not justly fire every Roman mind![322] [Sidenote: _and arbitrary absurdities._]