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
art and making it secondary to moral knowledge.
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