on 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 In short, the anthologies we depend upon are out of date.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