The Merry-Thought

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

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Glass-Window and
Bog-House Miscellany, by Hurlo Thrumbo (pseudonym) This eBook is
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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
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[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.]
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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