For whom my Heart had hoarded all its Truth,
I’ll ne’er love more, dispairing e’er to find,
Such Constancy and Truth amongst Mankind.
Feb. 18, 1725.
(Pt. 2, p. 12)
We will never know why she was unable to marry the man she truly loved; but her bitterness may have been short-lived. Just after this inscription comes a cynical comment identifying the lady as a member of the Walker family. And the writer insists that like all women she was inconstant, since he kissed her the next night.
This cynical approach to love and women dominates The Merry-Thought. Part three, for instance, contains a poem that reads like a parody of Belinda awaking in the first canto of Pope’s Rape of the Lock. The author, identified as W. Overb‑‑ry, presents a realistic morning scene without either the charms and beauties that surround Pope’s Belinda or the viciousness and focus of Swift’s similar pictures (see pt. 3, p. 26).
Prevailingly, women are depicted as sexually insatiable, as in a piece written by a man who takes a month’s vacation from sex to recoup his strength (pt. 2, p. 12). And the related image of the female with a sexual organ capable of absorbing a man plays a variation on the vagina dentata theme (e.g., pt. 2, pp. 19, 24). A drawing of a man hanging himself for love raises a considerable debate on whether such a thing can indeed occur (pt. 2, pp. 17-18). In a more realistic vein, though equally cynical, is the poem on the woman who complained of her husband making her pregnant so often:
A poor Woman was ill in a dangerous Case,
She lay in, and was just as some other Folks was: