Taste and novelty

In most countries, novelty, in every form of extravagance, broad humour, and caricature, affords the greatest delight to the populace. This preference is congenial with their love of coarse pleasures, and distinguishes the multitude from the more polite classes of every nation. The inferior orders of society are therefore disqualified from deciding upon the merits of the fine arts; and the department of taste is consequently confined to persons enlightened by education and conversant with the world, whose views of nature, of art, and of mankind, are enlarged and elevated by an extensive range of observation. Kett's Elements of General Knowledge.