For this purpose, it is not necessary that he should go into such a
compass of reading, as must, by distracting his attention, disqualify him
for the practical part of his profession, and make him sink the performer
in the critic. Reading, if it can be made the favourite recreation of
his leisure hours, will improve and enlarge his mind without retarding
his actual industry.

What such partial and desultory reading cannot afford, may be supplied by
the conversation of learned and ingenious men, which is the best of all
substitutes for those who have not the means or opportunities of deep
study. There are many such men in this age; and they will be pleased
with communicating their ideas to artists, when they see them curious and
docile, if they are treated with that respect and deference which is so
justly their due. Into such society, young artists, if they make it the
point of their ambition, will by degrees be admitted. There, without
formal teaching, they will insensibly come to feel and reason like those
they live with, and find a rational and systematic taste imperceptibly
formed in their minds, which they will know how to reduce to a standard,
by applying general truth to their own purposes, better perhaps than
those to whom they owed the original sentiment.

Of these studies and this conversation, the desired and legitimate
offspring is a power of distinguishing right from wrong, which power
applied to works of art is denominated taste. Let me then, without
further introduction, enter upon an examination whether taste be so far
beyond our reach as to be unattainable by care, or be so very vague and
capricious that no care ought to be employed about it.

It has been the fate of arts to be enveloped in mysterious and
incomprehensible language, as if it was thought necessary that even the