No one ever attained to what is usually called _good taste_ who has not devoted a portion of his time and study to the whole science and art of Poetry. We do not mean good taste in relation to any one manifestation of it. There is a general as well as a special good taste, but they are distinguishable only as genus and species. There is, it may be alleged, a _native_ as well as an _acquired_ taste. This may also be conceded. There is in some persons a greater innate susceptibility of deriving pleasure from the works of Nature and of Art than is discoverable in others. Still we cannot imagine any one gifted with reason and sensibility to be entirely destitute of it. It is an element of reason and of sense peculiar to man. As a fabulist once represented a cock in quest of barleycorns, scraping for his breakfast, saying to himself, on discovering a precious and brilliant gem: 'If a lapidary were in my place he would now have made his fortune; but as for myself, I prefer one grain of barley to all the precious stones in the world.' But what man, so feeling and thinking, would not 'blush and hang his head to think himself a man'? Apart from the value of the gem, every man of reason or of thought has pleasure in the contemplation of the beautiful diamond, whether on his own person or on that of another. Taste seems to be as inseparable from reason as Poetry is from imagination. It is not wholly the gift of Nature, nor wholly the gift of Art. It is an innate element of the human constitution, designed to beautify and beatify man. To cultivate and improve it is an essential part of education. The highest civilization known in Christendom is but the result or product of good taste. Even religion and morality, in their highest excellence, are but, so far as society is concerned, developments and demonstrations of cultivated taste. There may, indeed, be a fictitious or chimerical taste without Poetry or Religion; but a genuine good taste, in our judgment, without these handmaids, is unattainable. But as no interesting landscape--no mountain, hill, or valley, no river, lake or sea--affords us all that charms, excites or elevates our imagination viewed from any one point of vision, so the poetic faculty itself can neither be conceived of nor appreciated, contemplated out of its own family register. There is in all the 'Fine Arts' a common paternity, and hence a family lineage and a family likeness. To appreciate any one of them we must form an acquaintance with the whole sisterhood--Poetry, Music, Painting, and Sculpture.