Page:The Daughters of England.djvu/113

103 are best able to judge, may safely be considered as most in accordance with good taste. Thus, when your taste has received from your parents a particular bias, which you are afterwards led to suspect is not a correct one, inquire with all respect, whether, on that particular subject, your parents are the persons best qualified to judge. Or when you find in society that anything is universally approved or condemned, before accommodating your own taste to this exhibition of popular feeling, ask whether the judges who pronounce such sentence, are competent ones, and if there be a higher tribunal at which the question can be tried—or in other words, judges who understand the subject better, let it be referred to them, before you finally make up your mind.

Perhaps it may be objected that this is a tedious process, and that taste is a thing of sudden conclusion. But let it be remembered, I am now speaking of the formation of a good taste, as a part of the character; not of the operation of taste where it has been found. Nor, indeed, is the suddenness with which some young persons decide in matters of taste, any proof of their good sense. So far from this, we often find them, under the influence of better judges, reduced to the mortifying necessity of changing their opinions to the direct opposite of what they have too hastily expressed.

Still, though the process of forming the taste upon right principles, may at first be slow; and though it may some, times appear too tedious for juvenile impetuosity, the exercise of good taste will in time become so easy, and habitual, as to operate almost like an instinct; and, until it is so, the process I have recommended, will have the great advantage of preventing young ladies from being too forward in expressing their sentiments; and what is of far greater importance, they will be cautious in making their selection of what they admire, and what they condemn.