Essay Upon Wit 1716

Author : Sir Richard Doddridge Blackmore
Publisher : Library of Alexandria
ISBN 13 : 1465601651
Total Pages : 45 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (656 download)

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Download or read book Essay upon Wit written by Sir Richard Doddridge Blackmore and published by Library of Alexandria. This book was released on 2020-09-28 with total page 45 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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'sÊLondon 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, toÊPrince ArthurÊ(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 toÊKing 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 theÊSatyr against WitÊ(dated 1700 but issued late in 1699) the Wits set out to crush him for once and all.Commendatory Verses on the of the Two Arthurs and the Satyr against WitÊ(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 answeredÊCommendatory VersesÊwithDiscommendatoryVerses on Those Which are Truly Commendatory, on the 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'sÊDunciad.