The Merry-Thought

쁼
The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and?by Hurlo Thrumbo (pseudonym)

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and
Bog-House Miscellany, by Hurlo Thrumbo (pseudonym) This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany Parts 2, 3 and 4
Author: Hurlo Thrumbo (pseudonym)
Commentator: Maximillian E. Novak
Contributor: James Roberts
Release Date: February 6, 2007 [EBook #20535]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MERRY-THOUGHT ***

Produced by Louise Hope, David Starner and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

[Transcriber's Note:
The texts cited use a variety of long and short dashes, generally with no relationship to the number of letters omitted. For this e-text, short dashes are shown as separated hyphens, while longer dashes are shown as connected hyphens:
D - - - n Molley H----ns for her Pride.
Groups of vertical braces } represent a single brace encompassing three-- in one case, four-- rhymed lines.]
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The Augustan Reprint Society
THE MERRY-THOUGHT:
or, the Glass-Window and Bog-House MISCELLANY.
Parts 2, 3, and 4 (1731-?)
Introduction by MAXIMILLIAN E. NOVAK
Publication Number 221-222 WILLIAM ANDREWS CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY University of California, Los Angeles 1983

GENERAL EDITOR
David Stuart Rodes, University of California, Los Angeles
EDITORS
Charles L. Batten, University of California, Los Angeles George Robert Guffey, University of California, Los Angeles Maximillian E. Novak, University of California, Los Angeles Nancy M. Shea, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library Thomas Wright, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
ADVISORY EDITORS
Ralph Cohen, University of Virginia William E. Conway, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library Vinton A. Dearing, University of California, Los Angeles Phillip Harth, University of Wisconsin, Madison Louis A. Landa, Princeton University Earl Miner, Princeton University James Sutherland, University College, London Norman J. W. Thrower, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library Robert Vosper, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library John M. Wallace, University of Chicago
PUBLICATIONS MANAGER
Nancy M. Shea, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
CORRESPONDING SECRETARY
Beverly J. Onley, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
EDITORIAL ASSISTANT
Frances Miriam Reed, University of California, Los Angeles

INTRODUCTION
In an address to the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies at the 1983 annual meeting, Roger Lonsdale suggested that our knowledge of eighteenth-century poetry has depended heavily on what our anthologies have decided to print. For the most part modern anthologies have, in turn, drawn on collections put together at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the next, when the ideal for inclusion was essentially that of "polite taste." The obscene, the feminine, and the political were by general cultural agreement usually omitted. Lonsdale is not the only scholar questioning the basis of the canon; indeed, revisionism is fast becoming one of the more ingenious--and useful--parlor games among academics. Modern readers are no longer so squeamish about obscenity nor so uncomfortable with the purely personal lyric as were the editors at the end of the eighteenth century. And we are hardly likely to find poetry written by women objectionable on that score alone. In short, the anthologies we depend upon are out of date.
Among the works that would never have been a source of poems for the canon, and one mentioned by Lonsdale, was the collection of verse published in four parts by J. Roberts beginning in 1731, The Merry-Thought: or, the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany, commonly known simply as The Bog-House Miscellany. Its contemporary reputation may be described as infamous. James Bramston, in his The Man of Taste (1733), mentioned it as an example in poetry of the very opposite of "good Taste" (ARS 171 [1975], 7). Polite taste, of course, is meaningful only if it can define itself by what it excludes, and nothing could be in worse taste than a collection of pieces written on windows, carved in tables, or inscribed on the walls of Britain's loos.
Just as the compilers of a modern work, The Good Loo Guide, were parodying a well-known guide book to British restaurants, so the unknown authors of The Merry-Thought had some notion, however discontinuous, of parodying the nation's polite literature. Were not Pope and Swift famous for their distinguished miscellanies? What could be more amusing than a collection of poems that represented a different poetic ideal--a collection of verse with none of the pretensions to artistic merit claimed by the superstars of the poetic world--the spontaneous productions of nonpoets in moments of idleness or desperation. Apparently some of the inscribers in the bog-houses used excrement as a medium for--as well as a subject of--their inscriptions. The Merry-Thought, then, is not even the kind of art that Dryden attacked in MacFlecknoe and Pope in his Dunciad--the work of bad poets masquerading as geniuses.[1] Rather, it is a