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.[7]
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.[8]
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.[9] 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.[10] 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.[11]
The title-page of Part I of The Merry-Thought states that the contents of the pamphlet had been taken from "Original Manuscripts written in Diamond by Persons of the first Rank and Figure in Great Britain" and that they had been "Faithfully Transcribed from the Drinking-Glasses and Windows in the several noted Taverns, Inns, and other Publick Places in this Nation. Amongst which are intermixed the Lucubrations of the polite Part of the World, written upon Walls in Bog-houses, &c." These statements suggest one of the principal leveling strategies of the pamphlet as a whole: the nobility and the rich, whatever their advantages otherwise, must, like the lowest amongst us, make use of privies; and, in the process, they are just as likely as their brethren of the lower classes to leave their marks on the walls of those conveniences.
A number of the verses included in the pamphlet continue the leveling process. One in particular (p. 20) adopts the principal strategy employed on the title-page:
From the Temple Bog-House.