wc.03 - signed
If it should appear that, instead of displaying new doctrines or furnishing novel ideas, this volume serves rather by a new method to elucidate old established principles, and to confirm long received opinions, I can only plead in my excuse that true taste, in every art, consists more in adapting tried expedients to peculiar circumstances than in that inordinate thirst after novelty, the characteristic of uncultivated minds, which from the facility of inviting wild theories, without expierence, are apt to suppose that taste is displayed by novelty, genius by innovation, and that every change must necessarily tend to improvement. H.R
If it should appear that, instead of displaying new doctrines or furnishing novel ideas, this volume serves rather by a new method to elucidate old established principles, and to confirm long received opinions, I can only plead in my excuse that true taste, in every art, consists more in adapting tried expedients to peculiar circumstances than in that inordinate thirst after novelty, the characteristic of uncultivated minds, which from the facility of inviting wild theories, without expierence, are apt to suppose that taste is displayed by novelty, genius by innovation, and that every change must necessarily tend to improvement. H.R