If there be one conclusion more forcibly pressed upon us than another by the review which has been given of the fortunes and fate of poetical Works, it is this—­that every author, as far as he is great and at the same time original, has had the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed:  so has it been, so will it continue to be.  This remark was long since made to me by the philosophical Friend for the separation of whose poems from my own I have previously expressed my regret.  The predecessors of an original Genius of a high order will have smoothed the way for all that he has in common with them;—­and much he will have in common; but, for what is peculiarly his own, he will be called upon to clear and often to shape his own road:—­he will be in the condition of Hannibal among the Alps.

And where lies the real difficulty of creating that taste by which a truly original poet is to be relished?  Is it in breaking the bonds of custom, in overcoming the prejudices of false refinement, and displacing the aversions of inexperience?  Or, if he labour for an object which here and elsewhere I have proposed to myself, does it consist in divesting the reader of the pride that induces him to dwell upon those points wherein men differ from each other, to the exclusion of those in which all men are alike, or the same; and in making him ashamed of the vanity that renders him insensible of the appropriate excellence which civil arrangements, less unjust than might appear, and Nature illimitable in her bounty, had conferred on men who may stand below him in the scale of society?  Finally, does it lie in establishing that dominion over the spirits of readers by which they are to be humbled and humanized, in order that they may be purified and exalted?

If these ends are to be attained by the mere communication of knowledge, it does not lie here.—­TASTE, I would remind the reader, like IMAGINATION, is a word which has been forced to extend its services far beyond the point to which philosophy would have confined them.  It is a metaphor, taken from a passive sense of the human body, and transferred to things which are in their essence not passive,—­to intellectual acts and operations.  The word, Imagination, has been overstrained, from impulses honourable to mankind, to meet the demands of the faculty which is perhaps the noblest of our nature.  In the instance of Taste, the process has been reversed; and from the prevalence of dispositions at once injurious and discreditable, being no other than that selfishness which is the child of apathy,—­which, as Nations decline in productive and creative power, makes them value themselves upon a presumed refinement of judging.  Poverty of language is the primary cause of the use which we make of the word, Imagination; but the word, Taste, has been stretched to the sense which it bears in modern Europe by habits of self-conceit,