Amongst such treatises, product of their age, one written by the Spaniard Baltasar Gracian (1642) became celebrated throughout Europe.[4] Wit became in his hands the strictly inventive or artistic faculty, "genius"; _génie,_ "genius" were now used as synonyms of wit, _ingegno_ and _esprit._ In the following century Mario Pagano[5] wrote: "Wit may be taken as equivalent to the _génie_ of the French, a word now commonly used in Italy." To return to the seventeenth century, Bouhours, a Jesuit writer of dialogues on the _Manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages d'esprit_ (1687), says that "'heart' and 'wit' are greatly in fashion just now, nothing else is spoken of in polite conversation, and all discourse is at last brought round to _l'esprit et le cœur._"[6] [Sidenote: _Taste._] The word _taste_ or _good taste_ was equally widespread and fashionable, signifying the faculty of judgement brought to bear on the beautiful, distinct to some extent from intellectual power, and sometimes divided into active and passive, so that it was usual to speak of one kind of taste as "productive" or "fertile" (thus coinciding with "wit"), and of another as "sterile." [Sidenote: _Various meanings of the word taste._] From the rough notes which we possess as to the history of the concept of taste, several meanings of the word, not all of equal importance as indications of the development of ideas, detach themselves in a somewhat confused manner. "Taste," meaning "pleasure" or "delight," was an old-established word in Italy and Spain, as is shown in such phrases as "to have a taste for, to be to one's taste"; when Lope di Vega and other Spaniards speak continually of the drama of their country as seeking to please the popular taste ("_deleita el gusto_"; "_para darle gusto_") they mean only the "pleasure" of the populace. In Italy there was a very ancient use of the word in the metaphorical sense of "judgement," either literary, scientific, or artistic; numberless examples of this use occur in writers of the sixteenth century (Ariosto, Varchi, Michæl Angelo, Tasso). To take but one of these: the lines in _Orlando Furioso_ where it is said of the Emperor Augustus, "_L' aver avuto in poesia buon gusto La proscrizione iniqua gli perdona,_" "For having had good taste in poetry he shall be forgiven his iniquitous proscriptions"; or the remark of Ludovico Dolce that' some person "had such exquisite taste, he sang no verses save those of Catullus and Calvus."[7] The word "taste," in the sense of a special faculty or attitude of mind, appears to have been used for the first time in Spain in the middle of the seventeenth century by Gracian,[8] the moralist and political writer already quoted. It is evidently to him that the Italian author Trevisano alludes in a preface to a book by Muratori (1708) when he speaks of "Spaniards, above all others cunning in metaphor," who express themselves in "that eloquent and laconic