Convinced of your earnest desire to devote yourselves to your several duties, I have here taken the liberty of sketching them to your view. One still remains, of all, perhaps, the most difficult; I mean the preservation of taste. What is taste? Where are the judges of taste? Is it the public? The public are liable to be seduced. Were it not so, taste would be privileged from corruption. Is it the race of authors? They are subject to errors and mistakes; and their blemishes serve frequently to mislead others. Shall it be a society? Who has invested them with a right, which no sovereign can assume? Is it an individual? Who has conferred this honour upon him? The foundations of taste are, however, not the less certain; and her temple rests upon two immoveable pillars—Feeling, which invents without the aid of reflection, and Reason, which subjects every thing to her enquiry. But it will be alledged, that feeling and reason are not unfrequently at variance with each other. I will, however, venture to assert, that they are never so much in opposition as not to be easily reconciled, except it be amongst those, whose exalted opinion of their own abilities prompts them to prefer their own individual taste to the sense of the public, and their own sentiments to the sentiments of others. Amongst different nations, we may indeed discover a difference of taste; but all enlightened countries agree in the essential principles. An individual, who should take his own caprice for a guide, may be disgusted with Virgil; another may condemn Ovid as too frivolous, and blame Boileau for his frigidity; a third may condemn Quinault, because he is effeminate: but the majority of genuine connoisseurs will ever read with pleasure and admiration the Æneid, the Metamorphoses, the
