III. Sir Roger's Criticisms on Polite Society
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).