of poetry as an expression of the passions, and to Hutcheson in his
emphasis on benevolence and the psychological basis of perception.
But to these views, he frequently adds personal eccentricities. For
example, _Taste: An Epistle to a Young Critic_ reveals its Popean
descent in its tone and form; however, its gastronomic ending displays
Armstrong's interest, as a physician, in the relation of diet to
literary taste. If Armstrong's boast that "I'm a shrewd observer,
and will guess What books you doat on from your fav'rite mess," is
a personal eccentricity, his attack on false criticism and his
exhortation to judge for oneself are typical harbingers of late
eighteenth-century individualism and confidence in the "natural" man.

An honest farmer, or shepherd [writes Armstrong in "Of
Taste"], who is acquainted with no language but what is
spoken in his own county, may have a much truer relish of the
_English_ writers than the most dogmatical pedant that ever
erected himself into a commentator, and from his _Gothic_
chair, with an ill-bred arrogance, dictated false criticism to
the gaping multitude.[1]

[Footnote 1: John Armstrong, _Miscellanies_ (London, 1770), II, 137.]

Cooper and Armstrong both hold a historically intermediate position
in their attitudes toward taste, accepting early eighteenth-century
assumptions and balancing them with late eighteenth-century emphases.
Neither of them abandons the moral assumption of art which, as
Armstrong explains it, is a belief in "a standard of right and wrong
in the nature of things, of beauty and deformity, both in the natural
and moral world."[2] Cooper, who defines taste as a thrilling response
to art, falls back upon Hutcheson in minimizing the importance of