The ‘wits’ who beset Sir Richard Blackmore (original) (raw)

During recent cataloguing of the Old Library at St Edmund Hall a copy of "Commendatory verses, on the author of the two Arthurs and the satyr against wit" (London: Printed in the year MDCC) was found to include manuscript attributions for the forty anonymous poems attacking Sir Richard Blackmore which make up the text. This paper analyses these attributions and compares them with other sources, and attempts to judge their likely accuracy and draw a picture of the circle of "wits" who beset Blackmore at the end of the seventeenth century