An important passage in Eliot's essay on Marvell proceeds through the contrast of ‘wit’ and ‘magniloquence’ with a subsequent sketch of some possibilities of wit which help to delineate the nature of Marvell's own affinities. And it is part of a larger ‘placing’, as Leavis would say, in which a characteristic employment of wit finds its role in turn in the larger literary tradition. It also is presented with a certain grandeur of elaboration, a growing awareness of scale, a richness of reference, a fullness of one's sense of the possibilities of the uses of wit, to give the impression of wit as viewed through the manner of magniloquence itself. The aim is to elicit contrastively versions of the blend of these opposing qualities in the late seventeenth century, but the sheer force of comparison develops its own elan, and one plunges forward in time and beyond the limits of the original distinction: