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 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.
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