One will tell me, perhaps, that there are great beauties which make themselves felt to everyone; for example, those that one calls particularly the beauties of sentiment. I reply first that, although everybody feels certain beauties, not everybody feels them equally. Secondly, there are a great many beauties, and some of them the highest, which are only felt by persons of great intellectual accomplishment. As for the sentiments, they are accessible to everybody only when they are simple and simply expressed. If they are a bit composite, or rendered with finesse and elegance, they escape the multitude, and sometimes they even appear to them to be false.
—l’Abbé N. C. J. Trublet, Essais sur divers sujets de littérature et de morale (Amsterdam, 1755), quoted in The Aesthetic Thought of the French Enlightenment (U. of Pittsburgh Press, 1971) by Francis X. J. Coleman
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