English Wits by Russell, Leonard (editor); wood engravings by Eric Ravilious - 1953

Hutchinson, Stratford Place, London UK, 1953. 75. Fine/Fine. Gratitude, Dr. Johnson said, is a fruit of great cultivation… The same is surely true of wit... Wit demands a soil of civilisation to grow in; it will not spring up self-sown, like the ale-house humour of a Villon. Commonly, too, wit will derive its colour and character from its own environment; and what one generation takes for granted as part of its standpoint, the next generation may see as something absurd, satirizable... With this shifting of humour-values, how is it that any residuum defies the centuries? Perhaps because there is a subtle quality about the really great wits which is not of the period to which they belong. Not in the sense that they are misfits... unrepresentative of their periods; Johnson could only have happened in the middle of the eighteenth century, and it is difficult enough to believe that he happened then." [Dr. Johnson by Ronald A. Knox, p.29] 1ST EDITION, 3RD IMPRESSIONISM