ight," and there is a particularly vivid passage in which the stars
are seen as throwing down "freezing Daggers" at the poor starving
children in the streets and another in which we encounter an aged woman
who wields a broom against spiders and against all the young women who
threaten to come near the narrator (26).[10] The mystic temperament is
often capable of making connections between the spiritual and the
excremental,[11] between the sublime and the bathos of "Thunder-bolts
from Anus." Blake, we should recall, has poems depicting himself
defecating.[12]

[Footnote 9: Without suggesting that Blake may have known of
Johnson's work, I would nevertheless note the similarity of certain
sections. Like Blake, Johnson mingled comedy and satire in his
vision.]

[Footnote 10: Compare Blake's "The Mental Traveler," _The Poetry and
Prose of William Blake_, ed. David Erdman and Harold Bloom (Garden
City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970), 476-77.]

[Footnote 11: See Pops, 31.]

[Footnote 12: Blake, _Poetry and Prose_, 491.]

Whether Johnson actually collected _The Merry-Thought_ or not, the
reasons for the association of these volumes with his name should then
be clear enough. While Fielding might appropriate the title "Scriblerus
Secundus" by way of staking out a line of descent for his humor and
satire, Hurlothrumbo was so thoroughly connected with Johnson and his
play that I can see no reason why he should not be considered the likely
editor of such a varied and eccentric collection of verse and prose as
_The Merry-Thought_. That the "Variety" bears no resemblance to that of
serious art, however, should be as obvious as the difference between a
William Blake and a Samuel Johnson of Cheshire. As William Hogarth was
to remark, "variety uncomposed, and without design is confusion and
deformity."[13]

[Footnote 13: _The Analysis of Beauty_, ed. Joseph Burke (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1955), 35.]

Of course, miscellanies by their very nature are likely to be organized
according to principles of variety. What makes _The Merry-Thought_
different from those appealing to polite taste is the wide swings of
emotion that prompt the writers of these poems and catch the compiler's
fancy. As we have seen, the verses themselves vary from the grossest
comments on shit to the most passionate expressions of love. That the
one is likely to appear on the walls of latrines and the other to be cut
in glass by a diamond is part o