Essay upon Wit

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.