Response

Court wit is the cave-fish turned inside out — an organism that has evolved not for darkness but for the specific luminosity of patronage, where being seen is the entire adaptive pressure. The retrieval refused to give me Prior, and this is itself diagnostic. What it gave me instead is the infrastructure Prior worked within: Jonson's courtroom voices, Dryden's calibrated plainness, Herrick's epigrammatic silence. These are the walls of the room Prior inherited. And the room's defining feature is that difficulty doesn't disappear in it — it becomes currency.

Herrick's 'Upon Case' is the prototype: a lawyer who "Cries out (my Lord, my Lord) the Case is clear" — Herrick — when the chamber is noisy, but who "a fish more mute, / Bestirs his Hand, but starves in hand the Suite" — Herrick — when silence falls. The fish appears when performance stops. Case's wit requires the confusion of the Commons to function; in quiet, he is not merely silent but ichthyoid, cold-blooded, something from a different element entirely. Difficulty has not vanished. It exists only in its social medium, like bioluminescence that needs the pressure of deep water to glow.

Dryden gives me the mechanism more explicitly. "Shall I speak plain, and in a Nation free / Assume an honest Layman's Liberty?" — Dryden. The question is rhetorical, but the rhetorical question is doing real work: it frames plainness as something that must be *assumed*, a liberty that requires permission. And then: "Were none admitted there but men of Wit" — Dryden. The gate metaphor makes wit a credential, a social pass. The whole passage in *Religio Laici* performs the operation the stimulus is circling: it distinguishes between the "unletter'd Christian, who believes in gross" — Dryden — and those "by Nature form'd, with Learning fraught, / Born to instruct, as others to be taught" — Dryden. This is not a description of two kinds of reader. It is a description of two social positions that determine what counts as difficulty in the first place. The plodder who "ne'er is at a loss" — Dryden — doesn't experience theological complexity as difficulty because he has no access to the discourse where it registers as complex. His plainness is not a style; it is a class condition. Dryden's couplets — smooth, authoritative, calibrated to sound like they are merely thinking aloud — are the technology that makes this knowledge bearable. The difficulty of *Religio Laici* is not its argument but its social confidence: the poem assumes it has the right to settle the question, and the heroic couplet is the formal mechanism that produces that assumption as sound.

Barrett Browning, arriving unbidden as she keeps doing, twists the spine of the whole problem. Her Psellus passage describes "men whose erudition has grown stronger than their souls" — Barrett Browning. This is the court wit's nightmare rendered as intellectual history: accumulation that becomes obstruction, learning that mummifies rather than animates. "How many whom we would gladly see washed in the clean waters of a little ignorance" — Barrett Browning. The metaphor inverts Dryden's spring: his waters grow "More limpid, more unsoyl'd" — Dryden — the closer you get to the source. Hers would wash the accumulated soil away entirely. But here is what neither the cave-fish image nor the court-currency model quite captures: the possibility that difficulty-as-social-currency produces not blindness but a specific kind of sight that mistakes itself for all sight. Prior's absence from the retrieval may be the corpus telling me something honest — that the court wit's difficulty is not hidden or vanished or adapted but simply *not there* in the way I keep expecting it to be. The cave-fish evolved organs for darkness. The court wit evolved organs for a room. Take him out of the room and what remains is not difficulty but manner — the residue of a social performance whose audience has been dead for three centuries. Whether the manner itself still functions as a mechanism, or whether it only ever functioned as a key to a door that no longer exists, is what Prior — when the corpus finally yields him — will have to answer.