The Augustan Reprint Society ESSAYS ON TASTE from John Gilbert Cooper _Letters Concerning Taste_ Third Edition (1757) & John Armstrong _Miscellanies_ (1770) With an Introduction by Ralph Cohen Publication Number 30 Los Angeles William Andrews Clark Memorial Library University of California _GENERAL EDITORS_ H. RICHARD ARCHER, _Clark Memorial Library_ RICHARD C. BOYS., _University of Michigan_ EDWARD NILES HOOKER, _University of California, Los Angeles_ JOHN LOFTIS, _University of California, Los Angeles_ _ASSISTANT EDITOR_ W. EARL BRITTON, _University of Michigan_ _ADVISORY EDITORS_ EMMETT L. AVERY, _State College of Washington_ BENJAMIN BOYCE, _Duke University_ LOUIS I. BREDVOLD, _University of Michigan_ CLEANTH BROOKS, _Yale University_ JAMES L. CLIFFORD, _Columbia University_ ARTHUR FRIEDMAN, _University of Chicago_ LOUIS A. LANDA, _Princeton University_ SAMUEL H. MONK, _University of Minnesota_ ERNEST MOSSNER, _University of Texas_ JAMES SUTHERLAND, _Queen Mary College, London_ H.T. SWEDENBERG, JR., _University of California, Los Angeles_ INTRODUCTION The essays on taste taken from the work of John Gilbert Cooper and John Armstrong and reprinted in this issue are of interest and value to the student of the eighteenth century because they typify the shifting attitudes toward taste held by most mid-century poets and critics. Cooper, who accepts the Shaftesbury-Hutchesonian thesis of the internal sense, emphasizes the personal, ecstatic effect of taste. Armstrong, while accepting the rationalist notions of clarity and simplicity, attacks methodized rules and urges reliance on individuality. Following Shaftesbury and Hutcheson closely, Cooper treats taste as an immediate, prerational response of an internal sense to the proportion and harmony in nature, a response from an internal harmony of the senses, imagination, and understanding to a similar harmony in external nature. Cooper defines the effect of good taste as a "Glow of Pleasure which thrills thro' our whole Frame." This "Glow" is characterized by high emotional sensibility, and it thus minimizes the passivity which Hutcheson attributes to the internal sense.