tral, and no signals must be given to the enemy. Even the heroine herself is a watcher, busy scrutinizing her beloved's behavior for any dangerous veering from decorum. The private lifewhat happens after "the long hours of Public are past"is characterized by nonvisual senses, by the pleasures of taste (champagne and chicken) and the implied pleasures of touch in sex, which also becomes gustatory pleasure.
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Most eighteenth-century writers, including poets, could not make the distinction between public self and private self so airily. Lady Mary indeed fosters the fears of private life in some of her readers, who will see the dangers of allowing women any license to be private. Only by making women always public personages, entities always looked at and scrutinized, can husbands and fathers be sure of themselves. Yet that is a paradox, toothe paradox of
The Country Wife
for to take a woman into public life is to teach her the copiousness and diversity of men and manners which apprise her of new wants.
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The eighteenth century had no answer to its conundrums, no release from its paradoxes. The Day World, with all its bustle, noise, and blaze, was essential to the new Enlightenment and would not go away. The Night World might be looked to longingly, as the reciprocal image, the objective correlative of that private self which the Day World also needed to exist (or to imagine existing, as in new capitalist theory).
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Yet to describe Night is to illuminate itto turn Night into Day. Poetry offers little relief, refreshment, retirement, or escape because the very description of the twilight escape, the nocturnal refreshment, the private communing must turn these things into public activities, and render all the dark landscapes as places on the measurable map. Milton's paradox, describing the flames of Hell as "darkness visible," becomes paradoxically realized. Darkness does become "visible" once we describe it, and Night Thoughts, once uttered, become the property of Day.
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 | Davie, Donald. A Gathered Church:
The Literature of the English Dissenting Interest, 17001930
. London: Oxford University Press, 1978.
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| Doody, Margaret Anne.
The Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered
. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1985.
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