JAMES SUTHERLAND, _Queen Mary College, London_
H.T. SWEDENBERG, JR., _University of California, Los Angeles_




INTRODUCTION


The essays on taste taken from the work of John Gilbert Cooper and
John Armstrong and reprinted in this issue are of interest and value
to the student of the eighteenth century because they typify the
shifting attitudes toward taste held by most mid-century poets and
critics. Cooper, who accepts the Shaftesbury-Hutchesonian thesis of
the internal sense, emphasizes the personal, ecstatic effect of taste.
Armstrong, while accepting the rationalist notions of clarity
and simplicity, attacks methodized rules and urges reliance on
individuality.

Following Shaftesbury and Hutcheson closely, Cooper treats taste as an
immediate, prerational response of an internal sense to the proportion
and harmony in nature, a response from an internal harmony of the
senses, imagination, and understanding to a similar harmony in
external nature. Cooper defines the effect of good taste as a "Glow
of Pleasure which thrills thro' our whole Frame." This "Glow" is
characterized by high emotional sensibility, and it thus minimizes the
passivity which Hutcheson attributes to the internal sense.

Armstrong's sources are more eclectic than Cooper's. Armstrong shows
similarities to Pope in his rationalism, to Dennis in his treatment