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 medium for--as well as a subject of--their inscriptions. _The Merry-Thought_, then, is not even the kind of art that Dryden attacked in _MacFlecknoe_ and Pope in his _Dunciad_--the work of bad poets masquerading as geniuses.[1] Rather, it is a primitive form of folk art produced as a more or less spontaneous act of play or passion, and achieving some small degree of respectability only when practiced by a respected poet and collected with his more serious verse.[2] Like modern “serial” graffiti, it could function as a form of communication since the first inscriptions often provoked those who followed to make their own contributions. [Footnote 1: On the other hand, the willingness of publishers to bring out such material would have suited well enough with Pope’s picture of heir heroic games. See Alexander Pope, _The Dunciad_, ed. James utherland, Twickenham Edition, 2d ed., rev. (London: Methuen, 1953), 97-306, bk 2, lines 17-220.] [Footnote 2: See, for example, W. H. Auden’s “Academic Graffiti,” in Collected Poems_, ed. Edward Mendelsohn (London: Faber and Faber, 976), 510-18. Such a verse as the following is more clever than most raffiti, but like ordinary graffiti it remains essentially “unpoetic”: Lord Byron / Once succumbed to a Siren. / His flesh was weak, / Hers reek.”]