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Title: Essay upon Wit

Author: Sir Richard Blackmore

Release Date: September 17, 2004 [eBook #13484]
[Date last updated: February 15, 2005]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSAY UPON WIT***

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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 effe