duced 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 tha