=Motto.= "They used to think it a great crime, even deserving of death,
if a young man did not rise up in the presence of an elder."--Juvenal,
_Satires_, xiii. 54.
=59=: 6. =Wit and sense.= These were reckoned in the Queen Anne time
the cardinal virtues not only of literature, but of society. Keenness
and quickness of intellect, grace of form in letters, urbanity and good
breeding, brilliancy of converse in society--these were the qualities
the age most admired. This paper is one of many written by Steele
to protest against the divorce of these qualities from morality and
religion.
=59=: 9. =Abandoned writings of men of wit.= Steele probably has
especially in mind the drama of his time. English comedy was never
so witty and never so abandoned as in the fifty years following the
Restoration.
=60=: 8. =Lincoln's Inn Fields.= A large square just west of Lincoln's
Inn, at this time much frequented by beggars and sharpers.
=61=: 24. =Sir Richard Blackmore= (1650-1729), a dull, long-winded poet
of the time, whose verse has little beside its virtue to recommend
it. In the Preface to his long philosophical poem, _The Creation_,
published a few months after this paper was written, he inveighs at
great length against the licentiousness and atheism of men of wit
and letters; but the sentences in the text seem to be quoted, though
inaccurately, from the Preface to his earlier epic, _Prince Arthur_
(1695).