The Augustan Reprint Society


[JAMES BRAMSTON]

THE
MAN of TASTE
(1733)

Introduction by

F. P. Lock

PUBLICATION NUMBER 171
WILLIAM ANDREWS CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY
University of California, Los Angeles
1975
GENERAL EDITORS
  • William E. Conway, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
  • George Robert Guffey, University of California, Los Angeles
  • Maximillian E. Novak, University of California, Los Angeles
  • David S. Rodes, University of California, Los Angeles
ADVISORY EDITORS
  • Richard C. Boys, University of Michigan
  • James L. Clifford, Columbia University
  • Ralph Cohen, University of Virginia
  • Vinton A. Dearing, University of California, Los Angeles
  • Arthur Friedman, University of Chicago
  • Louis A. Landa, Princeton University
  • Earl Miner, Princeton University
  • Samuel H. Monk, University of Minnesota
  • Everett T. Moore, University of California, Los Angeles
  • Lawrence Clark Powell, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
  • James Sutherland, University College, London
  • H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., University of California, Los Angeles
  • Robert Vosper, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
CORRESPONDING SECRETARY
  • Beverly J. Onley, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
INTRODUCTION
For what has Virro painted, built, and planted?
Only to show, how many Tastes he wanted.
What brought Sir Visto's ill got wealth to waste?
Some Daemon whisper'd, "Visto! have a Taste."
(Pope, Epistle to Burlington)
The idea of "taste" and the ideal of the "man of taste" have fallen considerably in critical esteem since the eighteenth century. When F. R. Leavis calls Andrew Lang "a scholar and a man of taste, with a feeling for language and a desire to write poetry,"[1] it is clear that for Leavis these attributes disqualify Lang from being taken seriously as a poet. But for the age of Pope, "taste" was a key term in its aesthetic thinking; the meaning and application of the term was a lively issue which engaged most of the ablest minds of the period.
Addison prefaced his series of Spectator papers on the "Pleasures of the Imagination" with a ground-clearing essay on "taste" (No. 409). In this classic account of the term, Addison defines "taste" as "that Faculty of the Soul, which discerns the Beauties of an Author with Pleasure, and the Imperfections with Dislike." Addison's "taste" is an innate proclivity towards certain kinds of aesthetic experience that has been consciously cultivated in the approved direction. It is not enough to value and enjoy the right authors; they must be valued and enjoyed for the right reasons. When he holds up to ridicule the man who assured him that "the greatest Pleasure he took in reading Virgil, was in examining Aeneas his Voyage by the Map," Addison clearly expects his readers to agree that such a singular taste was in fact no taste at all. His account implies not only a standard of "taste," but also general agreement, at least among "men of taste," about what the standard was. It is this circularity that makes it essential to assume some innate faculty of "taste."
But Addison's prescripti                        
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