The end of wit was to surprise and delight. One may surprise by novelty, but the easiest road to the goal is audacity; and the subjects which lent themselves most readily to audacity were sex and religion. The treatment of the latter proved especially troublesome to good men like Blackmore, and the frequency of portraits and characters of the Profance Wit shows that many people were disturbed. Shaftesbury in _Sensus Communis_ (1709) tried to justify the use of wit in discussing religion. For the rest of the century Shaftesbury's position was the center of heated debate, with Akenside supporting, and John Brown and Warburton opposing, the employment of wit in religion; and the _Gentleman's Magazine_ is full of the arguments of lesser men who took sides. The author of the _Essay on Wit_ places himself firmly beside Shaftesbury when he remarks (p. 14) that "a Subject which will not bear Raillery, is suspicious." The controversy is reviewed in an article by A.O. Aldridge, called "Shaftesbury and the Test of Truth" (_PMLA_, LX, 129-156). 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.