The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Present State of Wit (1711), by John Gay

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Title: The Present State of Wit (1711) In A Letter To A Friend In The Country

Author: John Gay

Release Date: January 27, 2005 [EBook #14800]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PRESENT STATE OF WIT (1711) ***

Produced by David Starner, Linda Cantoni, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.

Series One:

Essays on Wit

No. 3

John Gay, The Present State of Wit (1711)

With an Introduction by

Donald F. Bond

and

a Bibliographical Note

and

Excerpts from

The English Theophrastus: or the Manners of the Age (1702)

With an Introduction by

W. Earl Britton

The Augustan Reprint Society

May, 1947

Price: 75c

GENERAL EDITORS: Richard C. Boys, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Edward N. Hooker, H.T. Swedenberg, Jr., University of California, Los Angeles 24, California.

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Lithoprinted from Author's Typescript

EDWARDS BROTHERS, INC.

Lithoprinters

ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN

1947

THE

Present State

OF

WIT,

IN A

LETTER

TO A

Friend in the Country.

LONDON Printed in the Year, MDCCXI

(Price 3 d.)

INTRODUCTION

Gay's concern in his survey of The Present State of Wit is with the productions of wit which were circulating among the coffee-houses of 1711, specifically the large numbers of periodical essays which were perhaps the most distinctive kind of "wit" produced in the "four last years" of Queen Anne's reign. His little pamphlet makes no pretence at an analysis of true and false wit or a refining of critical distinctions with regard to wit in its relations to fancy and judgment. Addressed to "a friend in the country," it surveys in a rapid and engaging manner the productions of Isaac Bickerstaff and his followers which are engrossing the interest of London. In other words it is an early example of a popular eighteenth-century form, of which Goldsmith's more extended Inquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning is the best known instance.

As such it well deserves a place in the Augustan Reprints series on wit. It has been reproduced before in this century, in An English Garner: Critical Essays and Literary Fragments (Westminster, 1903, pp. 201-10), with an attractive and informative introduction by J. Churton Collins. More information, however, is now at our disposal in the forty year interval since Collins wrote, both in regard to John Gay and to the bibliography of periodical literature in Queen Anne's time. Furthermore, the Arber reprint is difficult to obtain.

Gay is writing, he tells us, without prejudice "either for Whig or Tory," but the warm praise which he extends to Steele and Addison makes his pamphlet sound like the criticism of one very close to the Whigs. Though Gay is ordinarily associated with the Tory circle of Swift and Pope, he was in 1711 still in the somewhat uncertain position of a youngster willing to be courted by either group. His earliest sympathies were if anything on the side of the Whigs, in spite of the turn of events in the autumn of 1710. Gay's interests in these early years are nowhere so well analyzed as in the early pages of W.H. Irving's John Gay: Favorite of the Wits (Durham, N.C., 1940): cf. the title of the second chapter: "Direction Found—the Year 1713." Even as late as 1715 Swift apparently thought of him as a Whig (Swift's Letters, ed. Ball, II, 286, cited by Irving, p. 91).

One need not be surprised, then, to find Gay eulogizing Captain Steele as "the greatest scholar and best casuist of any man in England," an essayist whose writings "have set all our wits and men of letters on a new way of thinking." Swift's reaction is well known. "Dr. Freind was with me," he writes to Stella on May 14th, "and pulled out a two-penny pamphlet just published, called, The State of Wit, giving a character of all the papers that have come out of late. The author seems to be a Whig, yet he speaks very highly of a paper called the Examiner, and says the supposed author of it is Dr. Swift. But above all things he praises the Tatlers and Spectators; and I believe Steele and Addison were privy to the printing of it. Thus is one treated by these impudent dogs" (Journal to Stella, ed. J.K. Moorhead, Everyman's Library, p. 168).

In addition to the Tatler and Spectator Gay discusses a dozen other periodical publications which are of some interest to-day. Dr. King's "monthly Philosophical Transactions," mentioned in the third paragraph, had begun as a parody of the Royal Society's publications, but they had failed to hold the public interest, in spite of the wit of the author of the Art of Cookery: "though that gentleman has a world of wit…, the town soon grew weary of his writings." King's Useful Transactions in Philosophy had in fact run to only three numbers in the early months of 1709. The Monthly Amusement of John Ozell, mentioned in the following paragraph, which Churton Collins erroneously considered to be not a periodical but "simply his frequent appearances as a translator" (p. xxxii)—a statement, repeated by Lewis Melville in his Life and Letters of John Gay (London, 1921, p. 12)—ran for only six numbers, from April to September 1709. Gay's statement that it "is still continued" may refer to the better known Delights for the Ingenious; or a Monthly Entertainment for the Curious of Both Sexes (edited by John Tipper) which was currently appearing in 1711.

As to the political papers Gay's observations are moderate in tone. Defoe's Review (1704-13) and The Observator (1702-12), begun by John Tutchin, are noticed in rather supercilious fashion. The Examiner (1710-14) is damned with faint