The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany. Part 1

Part I. (_1731_)

(1731)

Introduction by GEORGE R. GUFFEY

Publication Number 216 WILLIAM ANDREWS CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY University of California, Los Angeles 1982

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 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 Arthur Friedman, University of Chicago Louis A. Landa, Princeton University Earl Miner, Princeton University Samuel H. Monk, University of Minnesota James Sutherland, University College, London Robert Vosper, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

CORRESPONDING SECRETARY

Beverly J. Onley, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

Frances M. Reed, University of California, Los Angeles

INTRODUCTION

For modern readers, one of the most intriguing scenes in Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722) occurs during the courtship of Moll by the man who is to become her third husband. Aware that the eligible men of her day have little interest in prospective wives with small or nonexistent fortunes, Moll slyly devises a plan to keep her relative poverty a secret from the charming and (as she has every reason to believe) wealthy plantation owner who has fallen in love with her. To divert attention from her own financial condition, she repeatedly suggests that he has been courting her only for her money. Again and again he protests his love. Over and over she pretends to doubt his sincerity.

After a series of exhausting confrontations, Moll's lover begins what is to us a novel kind of dialogue:

One morning he pulls off his diamond ring and writes upon the glass of the sash in my chamber this line:

You I love and you alone.

I read it and asked him to lend me the ring, with which I wrote under it thus:

And so in love says every one.

He takes his ring again and writes another line thus:

Virtue alone is an estate.

I borrowed it again, and I wrote under it:

But money's virtue, gold is fate.

After a number of additional thrusts and counterthrusts of this sort, Moll and her lover come to terms and are married.

The latter half of the twentieth century has seen a steady growth of serious scholarly interest in graffiti. Sociologists, psychologists, and historians have increasingly turned to the impromptu "scratchings" of both the educated and the uneducated as indicators of the general mental health and political stability of specific populations. Although most of us are familiar with at least a few of these studies and all of us have observed numerous examples of this species of writing on the walls of our cities and the rocks of our national parks, we are not likely, before encountering this scene in Moll Flanders, to have ever before come into contact with graffiti produced with such an elegant writing implement.

Glass being fragile and diamonds being relatively rare, it is not surprising that few examples of graffiti produced by the method employed by Moll and her lover are known to us today. Interestingly enough, we do, however, have available to us a variety of Renaissance and eighteenth-century written materials suggesting that the practice of using a diamond to write ephemeral statements on window glass was far less rare in those periods than we might expect. Holinshed, for example, tells us that in 1558 when Elizabeth was released from imprisonment at Woodstock, she taunted her enemies by writing

these verses with hir diamond in a glasse window verie legiblie as here followeth:

Much suspected by me, Nothing prooued can be: Quoth Elizabeth prisoner.

And in John Donne's "A Valediction: of my Name in the Window," we find two lovers in a situation reminiscent of that of the scene I previously quoted from Moll Flanders. Using a diamond, the poet, before beginning an extended journey, scratches his name on a window pane in the house of his mistress. Here is the first stanza of the poem:

My name engrav'd herein, Doth contribute my firmnesse to this glasse, Which, ever since that charme, hath beene As hard, as that which grav'd it, was; Thine eyes will give it price enough, to mock The diamonds of either rock.

While he is absent, the characters he has cut in the glass will, the poet hopes, magically defend his mistress against the seductive entreaties of his rivals.

In 1711 in a satiric letter to The Spectator, John Hughes poked fun at a number of aspiring poets who had recently attempted to create works of art by utilizing what Hughes called "Contractions or Expedients for Wit." One Virtuoso (a mathematician) had, for example, "thrown the Art of Poetry into a short Problem, and contrived Tables by which any one without knowing a Word of Grammar or Sense, may to his great Comfort, be able to compose or rather erect Latin Verses." Equally ridiculous to Hughes, and more relevant to the concerns of this introduction, was the practice of another poet of his acquaintance: "I have known a Gentleman of another Turn of Humour, who, despising the Name of an Author, never printed his Works, but contracted his Talent, and by the help of a very fine Diamond which he wore on his little Finger, was a considerable Poet upon Glass. He had a very good Epigrammatick Wit; and there was not a Parlour or Tavern Window where he visited or dined ... which did not receive some Sketches or Memorials of it. It was his Misfortune at last to lose his Genius and his Ring to a Sharper at Play; and he has not attempted to make a Verse since."

But "Epigrammatick Wits" of this sort were not universally despised in the eighteenth century. In 1727 in a "critical dissertation prefix'd" to A Collection of Epigrams, the anonymous editor of the work argued that the epigram itself "is a species of Poetry, perhaps, as old as any other whatsoever: it has receiv'd the approbation of almost all ages and nations...." In the book proper, he found room for a number of epigrams which he evidently copied from London window panes. Here is an example:

CLX.

To a Lady, on seeing some Verses in Praise of her, on a Pane of Glass.

Let others, brittle beauties of a year, See their frail names, and lovers vows writ here; Who sings thy solid worth and spotless fame, On purest adamant should cut thy name: Then would thy fame be from oblivion sav'd; On thy own heart my vows must be engrav'd.

One of the epigrams in this collection suggests that, unlike Moll's lover and Hughes's poet, some affluent authors had even acquired instruments specifically designed to facilitate the practice of writing poetry on glass:

Written on a Glass by a Gentleman, who borrow'd the Earl of CHESTERFIELD's Diamond Pencil.

Accept a miracle, instead of wit; See two dull lines by Stanhope's pencil writ.

As the title of this epigram also suggests, window panes were not the only surfaces considered appropriate for such writing. A favorite alternate surface was that of the toasting glass. The practice of toasting the beauty of young ladies had originated at the town of Bath during the reign of Charles II. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the members of some social clubs had developed complex toasting rituals which involved the inscription of the name of the lady to be honored on a drinking glass suitable for that purpose. In 1709 an issue of The Tatler described the process in some detail:

that happy virgin, who is received and drunk to at their meetings, has no more to do in this life but to judge and accept of the first good offer. The manner of her inauguration is much like that of the choice of a doge in Venice: it is performed by balloting; and when she is so chosen, she reigns indisputably for that ensuing year; but must be elected a-new to prolong her empire a moment beyond it. When she is regularly chosen, her name is written with a diamond on a drinking-glass.

Perhaps the most famous institution practicing this kind of ceremony in the eighteenth century was the Kit-Kat Club. In 1716 Jacob Tonson, a member of that club, published "Verses Written for the Toasting-Glasses of the Kit-Kat Club" in the fifth part of his Miscellany. Space limitations will not permit extensive quotations from this collection, but the toast for Lady Carlisle is alone sufficient to prove that complete epigrams were at times engraved upon the drinking glasses belonging to this club:

She o'er all Hearts and Toasts must reign, Whose Eyes outsparkle bright Champaign; Or (when she will vouchsafe to smile,) The Brilliant that now writes Carlisle.

Part I of _the Merry-Thought: or, the Glass-Window and Bog-House

Miscellany was almost certainly published for the first time in 1731. Arthur E. Case (Bibliography of English Poetical Miscellanies, 1521-1750) notes that this pamphlet was listed in the register of books in the Gentleman's Magazine_ for October 1731. An instant success with the reading public, second and third editions of the pamphlet, the third "with very Large Additions and Alterations," were also published in 1731. Because, as its title-page declared, the third and last edition was the fullest of the three, a copy of that edition has been chosen for reproduction here.

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