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Essay upon Wit By: Richard D. Blackmore (1654?-1729) |
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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. Edited by Tom Brown and sponsored by
Christopher Codrington, this miscellany attempted in scurrilous and
often bad verse to laugh the Knight out of literary existence. Its
main distinction lies in the list of contributors, among whom were Sir
Charles Sedley, Richard Steele, Tom Brown, and probably John
Dennis. Blackmore's supporters answered Commendatory Verses with
Discommendatory Verses on Those Which are Truly Commendatory, on
the Author of the Two Arthurs, and the Satyr against Wit . (1700).
It is not at all certain that Blackmore emerged second best in this
exchange of blows in the miscellanies. At any rate, unabashed he went
on to write more epics on Elizabeth, Alfred, Job, and to win himself a
doubtful immortality by being pilloried in Pope's Dunciad . Throughout his writings Blackmore has a good deal to say about Wit,
and much about the abuse of it. While Swift in the Tale of a Tub
scolds the Wits for their addiction to nonsense and irreligion,
Blackmore goes still further in the Satyr , seeing Wit as something
which, in common practice, is evil and vicious, to be eradicated as
quickly as possible. It is the enemy of virtue and religion (in the
Preface to Creation , 1712, he links it with atheism), a form of
insanity, in opposition to 'Right Reason', and the seducer of young
men... Continue reading book >>
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Humor |
Literature |
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