Be witty in these playful varieties of poetry, because wit in a large
and serious work would be insufferable.
"These Sports of the Imagination, these Finesses, these Conceits,
these glittering Strokes, these Gaieties, these little cut Sentences,
these ingenious Prodigalities" in which wit is expressed might be
either sober or funny. Most of the examples in the _Essay on Wit_ are
of the sober kind, coming under the order of wit because they are
pretty and diverting fancies. But by the 1690's there had been a clear
tendency to associate wit with mirth, and often with satire. By 1726
James Arbuckle could write (_A Collection of Letters_, 1729, II, 72):
"... Satire and Ridicule, which are the main Provocatives to Laughter,
still keep their ground among us, and are reckoned the chief
Embellishments of Discourse by all who aim at the Character of Wits."
The end of wit was to surprise and delight. One may surprise by
novelty, but the easiest road to the goal is audacity; and the
subjects which lent themselves most readily to audacity were sex and
religion. The treatment of the latter proved especially troublesome to
good men like Blackmore, and the frequency of portraits and characters
of the Profance Wit shows that many people were disturbed.
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