| Sumario: | During the first three decades of the eighteenth century, Jonathan Swift and members of his circle--which included Alexander Pope, John Gay, John Arbuthnot and Thomas Sheridan--wrote a series of satires on the technical prose of the day, referred to in this article as the "Scriblerian mock-arts." These included Swift's "Mechanical Operation of the Spirit," Pope's "Art of Sinking in Poetry," Gay's Trivia, and Arbuthnot's Art of Political Lying. They appeared at a time of innovation in the genres of British literature: the rise of the novel, the publication of the first Enlightenment encyclopedias, and the triumph of the daily essay- journal were already well underway. The Scriblerian mock-arts are significant because they belong in a small way to that revolution in mediation, and they are designed as a commentary upon it as well. This article describes the conventions of this neglected sub- genre. It shows how the Scriblerian satirists used it to argue the absurdity of trying to specify in print certain forms of tacit or personal knowledge.
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