Johnson called upon “Variety” as his most important artistic principle, and he developed his ideas on this subject in _A Vision of Heaven_ (1738), a work which bears a striking resemblance to William Blake’s _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_.[9] Johnson argues that all surface appearances are merely a form of “Hieroglyphic” concealing a true vision of things (6). His narrator is capable of what Blake was to call “mental flight,” 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.]