Wit was taken to be the source, of tropes, and figures of speech, of all the color and adornments of rhetoric; and the old tradition of rhetoric, handed down from the Renaissance, tended to regard tropes and figures as mere ornament, a means of decorating the surface, an artful prettifying of a subject in order that it might please.  For this reason wit was likely to be considered out of place in serious works which called for naturalness and passion.  The objection to the simile in the language of passion was an old note in English criticism (cf.  Dennis, Critical Works, I, 424); but the author of the Essay on Wit in condemning glittering strokes and ingenious prodigalities in impassioned literature shows by his phrasing that he is following Father Bouhours (cf.  Manlere die Bien Penser, Amsterdam, 1688, pp. 8-9, 234, 296, 388).

In Spectator, no. 249, Addison entered the contest known as the Battle of the Books, and lined himself up squarely on the side of the Ancients.  The ancients, he said, surpassed the moderns in poetry, painting, oratory, history, architecture, and, in fact, all arts and sciences which depend more on genius than on experience.  It was no lightening of the judgment when he added that the moderns surpass the ancients in doggerel, humour burlesque, and all the trivial arts of ridicule, the arts of the “unlucky little wits.”  So degraded had wit become!  In the Adventurer, nos. 127 and 133, Joseph Warton showed himself to be essentially in agreement with Addison’s verdict, differing only in thinking that a few moderns might compare with the ancients in works of genius.  He appears somewhat less scornful of wit, recognizing its part in the arts of civility and the decencies of conversation; and yet he associates It with ridicule, laughter, and luxury, and makes it the pleasant plaything of gentlemen.

Occasionally there were attempts to restore wit to its pristine glory, to the position it had occupied before it was tied to mirth and ridicule, when Atterbury could thus define it:  “Wit, indeed, as it implies, a certain uncommon Reach and Vivacity of Thought, is an Excellent Talent; very fit to be employ’d in the Search of Truth....”  So the anonymous author of A Satyr upon a Late Pamphlet Entitled, A Satyr against Wit (1700) could rhapsodize: 

  Wit is a Radiant Spark of Heav’nly Fire,
  Full of Delight, and worthy of Desire;
  Bright as the Ruler of the Realms of Day,
  Sun of the Soul, with in-born Beauties gay....

So Corbyn Morris in his Essay towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humour, Raillery, Satire, and Ridicule, 1744, probably the best and clearest treatment of the subject in the first half of the eighteenth century, wrote (p. 1):  “Wit is the Lustre resulting from the quick Elucidation of one Subject, by a just and unexpected Arrangement of it with another Subject.”  And so the author of the essay “Of Wit” in the Weekly Register for July 22, 1732, ventured his opinion (reprinted in the Gentleman’s Magazine, II, 861-862):