TASTE is the perception of intellectual pleasure. Beauty, the object of taste and the source of this pleasure, is appreciated by the understanding, exercised, either upon the productions of art, or upon the works of nature. The term beauty, indeed, has appeared to admit a specific difference of import, according to the diversity of objects in which it may seem to reside, and the supposed variety of means through which it is perceived by the mind. This cause, more than any other, has tended to throw difficulty and inconclusive inference over every department of the subject. Yet, perhaps in all cases, most certainly in every instance of practical importance to our present purpose--elucidation of the Fine Arts, beauty will be found resolvable into some relation discerned and approved by the understanding. Hence the objects in which this relation exists impart pleasure to the mind, on the well known principles of its constitution. But in all languages, the word beauty is applied to the results of those operations of the intellectual powers, which are not commonly recognised as appertaining to any province of taste. Thus we speak of the beauty of a theorem, of an invention, of a philosophical system or discovery, as frequently, and with the same propriety, as of a picture or a group of statuary, of a landscape or a building. Correspondent to these objective modes of speech, we find, in every polished idiom, such causative forms as these--a taste for the mathematics, for mechanics, for philology, or science. Now, in these, and similar instances, in which a like manner of expression by the common sentiment of mankind, opposed to the opinion of certain writers, is rightly applied, relations furnishing the specific beauty of the subjects are perceived, and pleasurable emotions are excited. What then constitutes the essential difference between the beautiful in general language, and the beautiful in the fine arts? or, which is identical, the difference between the powers of judgment and of taste? Shall we say with some, that to decide on the relations of truth and falsehood, is the sole province of the judgment or understanding? But in the fine arts, to whose labours, taste, by these philosophers, is confined, truth is beauty, falsehood deformity; hence, to discriminate between even their minutest shades, requires the constant exercise of the most refined taste. Or, shall we maintain with others, that beauty consists in certain arrangements and proportions of the parts to a whole; or in the fitness of means to an end? This, as far as an intelligible description of beauty, applies equally to the pursuits of the philosopher and of the artist. Or, omitting almost innumerable minor theories, shall we say with the philosophy presently accepted, that beauty is something not intrinsic in the beautiful object, but dependent on associations awakened in the mind of the spectator? Without entering now into an examination of this important, because