ESSAY UPON WIT

by

Sir Richard Blackmore

1716

With Commentary by Joseph Addison (Freeholder, No. 45, 1716) and an Introduction by Richard C. Boys

Series One:  Essays on Wit No. 1

Sir Richard Blackmore’s
Essay upon Wit (1716)

and

Joseph Addison’s
Freeholder, No. 45 (1716)

With an Introduction by
Richard C. Boys

The Augustan Reprint Society
May 1946
Price:  60c

Membership in the Augustan Reprint Society entitles the subscriber to six publications issued each year.  The annual membership fee is $2.50.  Address subscriptions and communications to the Augustan Reprint Society in care of the General Editors:  Richard C. Boys, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan; or Edward N. Hooker or H.T.  Swedenberg, Jr., University of California, Los Angeles 24, California.

Introduction

The battle between the puritans and the sophisticates is never ending.  At certain stages of cultural development the worldly wise are in the ascendent in the literary world, as they were in the Restoration and after the first World War.  Yet those with a more sober view of life are never submerged, even when they are overshadowed.  The court of the restored Charles gave full play to the indelicacy of Rochester, Dryden, and their circles, but most of their contemporaries were probably more content to read George Herbert, Queries, Baxter, and Bunyan.  Though the fashionable and urbane remained dominant in letters through the age of Dryden, the forces of morality were rallying, and after 1688 the court (with which Blackmore was connected) threw its weight on the side of virtue.  Jeremy Collier was but the most important voice of a great movement, destined to have its effect on literature.

Sir Richard Blackmore contributed his share to the growing wave of bourgeois morality, which in the 18th century was reflected in the middle-class appeal of Addison and Steel, Lillo’s London Merchant, and Richardson’s almost feminine plea for virtue rewarded.  A physician, Blackmore had turned to poetry for relaxation and composed his soporific epics, by his own admission, in the coffee-houses and in his coach while visiting patients.  In the preface, to Prince Arthur (1695) the City Bard took occasion to flay the Wits of the day for their immorality, an attack which he followed up in 1697 with the Preface to King Arthur, whose thinly disguised political allegory won him a knighthood.  Up to this point the Wits had treated him with amused scorn, but when he called his big guns into action in the Satyr against Wit (dated 1700 but issued late in 1699) the Wits set out to crush him for once and all. Commendatory Verses on the Author of the Two Arthurs and the Satyr against Wit (1700), the reply, was far from commendatory.