Had Johnson’s intention been something as relatively uncomplicated as literary parody he would have achieved some minor fame in a century which could boast any number of geniuses who had specialized in deriding the pretentiousness of the more established literary forms, particularly tragedy, the epic, and the pastoral. But Johnson of Cheshire lacked the aesthetic distance required of sustained irony and had a grander purpose in mind. His tradition was not that of the parodist but rather that of the visionary--the mystic whose tendency is to merge the high and the low, the sublime and the absurd, within a single work.[7] He was not attacking the extravagant rants of the heroic play as Fielding was to do in his _Tragedy of Tragedies_ (1731) or reflecting on opera and pastoral as Gay had done in _The Beggar’s Opera_ (1728); rather he was trying, however unsuccessfully, to maintain his own work at the highest reaches of sublimity. He was like one of Pope’s “_Flying Fishes_,” who “now and then rise upon their fins and fly out of the Profound; but their wings are soon dry, and they drop down to the bottom.”[8] [Footnote 7: See Martin Pops, “The Metamorphosis of Shit,” _Salmagundi_ 56 (1982): 27-61.] [Footnote 8: Alexander Pope, _Peri Bathous_, in _Literary Criticism of Alexander Pope_, ed. Bertrand A. Goldgar (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 54.] In his preface to _The Blazing Comet; or the Beauties of the Poets_ (1732), Johnson of Cheshire noted that “the same thought that makes the Fool laugh, may make the wise Man sigh” (ix). Given such an equivocal approach to the ways in which the audience responded to his work, the poet could easily shrug off audience laughter to his most “Sublime” lines. He was always ready “to leap up in Extasy; and dip ... [his] Pen in the Sun” (iv). Parts of _Hurlothrumbo_, particularly the scene between Lady Flame and Wildfire (both of whom are described in the list of characters as “mad”) in which Wildfire threatens to cast off his clothes and “run about stark naked” (48), bear an odd resemblance to “The King’s Cameleopard” in _Huckleberry Finn_. But the disconnected verbal structure, along with the music and dancing, achieves a strange mixture that must have amused and, to a certain extent, bemused its audience.