Produced by S.R.Ellison, David Starner, and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team.
The Augustan Reprint Society
from
John Gilbert Cooper
Letters Concerning Taste
Third Edition (1757)
&
John Armstrong
Miscellanies
(1770)
With an Introduction by
Ralph Cohen
Publication Number 30
Los Angeles
William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
University of California
GENERAL EDITORS
H. RICHARD ARCHER, Clark Memorial Library
RICHARD C. BOYS., University of Michigan
EDWARD NILES HOOKER, University of California, Los Angeles
JOHN LOFTIS, University of California, Los Angeles
ASSISTANT EDITOR
W. EARL BRITTON, University of Michigan
ADVISORY EDITORS
EMMETT L. AVERY, State College of Washington
BENJAMIN BOYCE, Duke University
LOUIS I. BREDVOLD, University of Michigan
CLEANTH BROOKS, Yale University
JAMES L. CLIFFORD, Columbia University
ARTHUR FRIEDMAN, University of Chicago
LOUIS A. LANDA, Princeton University
SAMUEL H. MONK, University of Minnesota
ERNEST MOSSNER, University of Texas
JAMES SUTHERLAND, Queen Mary College, London
H.T. SWEDENBERG, JR., University of California, Los Angeles
The essays on taste taken from the work of John Gilbert Cooper andJohn Armstrong and reprinted in this issue are of interest and valueto the student of the eighteenth century because they typify theshifting attitudes toward taste held by most mid-century poets andcritics. Cooper, who accepts the Shaftesbury-Hutchesonian thesis ofthe internal sense, emphasizes the personal, ecstatic effect of taste.Armstrong, while accepting the rationalist notions of clarityand simplicity, attacks methodized rules and urges reliance onindividuality.
Following Shaftesbury and Hutcheson closely, Cooper treats taste as animmediate, prerational response of an internal sense to the proportionand harmony in nature, a response from an internal harmony of thesenses, imagination, and understanding to a similar harmony inexternal nature. Cooper defines the effect of good taste as a "Glowof Pleasure which thrills thro' our whole Frame." This "Glow" ischaracterized by high emotional sensibility, and it thus minimizes thepassivity which Hutcheson attributes to the internal sense.
Armstrong's sources are more eclectic than Cooper's. Armstrong showssimilarities to Pope in his rationalism, to Dennis in his treatmentof poetry as an expression of the passions, and to Hutcheson in hisemphasis on benevolence and the psychological basis of perception.But to these views, he frequently adds personal eccentricities. Forexample, Taste: An Epistle to a Young Critic reveals its Popeandescent in its tone and form; however, its gastronomic ending displaysArmstrong's