From common form seem to originate beauty and deformity; and, as they recede from each other in opposite directions, they become less and less like their parent, common form, but never totally unlike; for it is their likeness to that form that constitutes the one beauty, and the other deformity; for, were there no resemblance in deformity to the common form, it would be a different species, and no longer disgust; and none in beauty, it would no longer please.

There is no particular common form, but which, to create beauty, an artist, who studies the perfection of the human form, must improve in some, if not in every part; to effect which, considered as mere form only, rules will suffice, but, considered as grace, it must express a sentiment that no rules can give!

That all feel the same sentiment of admiration for that which they think the most perfect, however the objects may differ, has induced some to believe that beauty is an arbitrary idea, and that it exists only in the imagination!  But does it follow, that, because it is not possible for the savage or the man of taste to judge of any object but as experience enables him to judge, that therefore there is no preeminence in that form which is beauty to the one above that which is beauty to the other?

Somewhere there must exist, whether perceived or not, the perfection, or highest point of excellence of the human form respecting proportion; and somewhere there must exist, or does at times exist, the highest excellence of its expression, i.e. the moral charm of the human countenance, grace.

The artist, who has only seen the beauty of his own nation, will from that form his standard of perfection.  But, when he comes to extend his enquiry, when he has viewed the beauty of other nations, particularly that form and that expression which the Grecian artists (who were probably on a line with the Grecian philosophers) modelled from their ideas of beauty! he will quit his partiality for the beauty of his own country, and prefer that of the Grecian, which I imagine is preferable to that of the whole world!  The only criterion to prove it so, I mean its form, would be to select from every nation the most perfect in it, and from that number to choose the most perfect, were this possible to be done, respecting the external form of beauty:  it could not respecting the internal expression of beauty, grace; for who shall be the world’s arbiter of the ne plus ultra of grace!

That the artists of all ages and of all nations have terminated their enquiries after beauty in that of the Grecian form is the highest proof that can be given of its superior excellence to that of all the world!

Common form, as I have observed before, is so much nearer beauty than deformity, that it is, in abstract idea, the model to compose beauty of form from.  The universal appearance of nature is, to every eye, right, fit, faultless, &c. therefore, if every part of the copy be the same, particularly, I mean, in the human form, beauty of form must result.