articularly
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.

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
fl