_Taste and good Taste._--It is necessary to distinguish between taste, and good taste. Many writers use the terms indifferently, as when we say such a one is a man of taste, meaning of good taste, or such a one has no taste whatever, meaning that he is a man of bad taste. Strictly speaking, the savage who rejoices in the disfigurement of his person by tattooing, paint, and feathers, is a man of _taste_, as really as the Broadway dandy, or the Parisian exquisite. He has his faculty of judging in such matters, and exercises it--his standard of judging, and comes up to it. He is a man of taste, but not of correct taste. He has his own notions, but they do not agree with ours. He violates all the rules and principles by which well-informed minds are guided in such matters. He shocks our notions of fitness and propriety, excites in us emotions of disgust, or of the ludicrous, and, on the whole, we vote him down as a man of no authority in such matters. _As related to Sensibility._--Thus far we have spoken of taste only as related to the judgment. It is necessary to consider also its relation to the _sensibility_. Taste and sensibility are very often confounded. They are, in reality, quite distinct. Sensibility, so far as we are at present concerned with it, is the mind's _capability of emotion_ in view of the beautiful or sublime. Taste is its _capability of judging_, in view of the same. Viewed as acts, rather than as states or powers of the mind, sensibility is the feeling awakened in view of a beautiful object; taste is the judgment or opinion formed respecting it. In the case already supposed, I stand before a fine statue or painting. It moves me, attracts me, fills me with delight and admiration. In this, it is not directly and immediately my taste, but my sensibility, that is affected and brought into play. I begin to judge of the object before me as a work of art, to form an opinion respecting its merits and demerits; and, in so doing, my taste is exercised.