"Doggerel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Upon this member Abe levelled his attacks, in rhyme, song, and chronicle; and though he could not reduce the nose he gave it a fame as wide as to the Wabash and the Ohio. It is not improbable that he learned the art of making the doggerel rhymes in which he celebrated Crawford's nose from the study ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... clown, and with a horn in his hand he made as much noise, and played as many antics, as any fool in the crowd. Though the tailor could not read, he usually composed the verses for the Charivari; and the doggerel of the father, mysteriously fructified, afterwards became the seed of poetry in ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... than in cruelty, with a chorus of drunken apprentices and riotous boys, to the spot where the humpbacked tinker had dragged his passive burden. The foul green pond near Master Sancroft's hostel reflected the glare of torches; six of the tymbesteres, leaping and wheeling, with doggerel song and discordant music, gave the signal for ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and was looking through some printed slips in his pocket-book. "I wanted you to see some of the fellow's articles in print, but I have nothing of importance here—only some of his 'doggerel,' as he calls it, and you've had a sample of that. But here's a bit of the upper spirit of the man—and still another that you should hear him recite. You can keep them both if you care to. The boys all fell in love with ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... yet). It is said that these people, including (according to an old joke) the founder of IBM, will be buried 'face down, 9-edge first' (the 9-edge being the bottom of the card). This directive is inscribed on IBM's 1402 and 1622 card readers and is referenced in a famous bit of doggerel called "The Last Bug", the climactic lines of ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... we here? Burgoyne's proclamation turned into Hudibrastic rhyme! And here, some verses against the king, in which the scribbler leaves a blank for the name of George, as if his doggerel might yet exalt him to the pillory. Such, after years of rebellion, is the heart's unconquerable reverence for the Lord's anointed! In the next column, we have scripture parodied in a squib against his sacred Majesty. What ...
— Old News - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... hog-back overlooking a small river valley on our left, and bringing into view an immense blue canyon far ahead of us. "There lies the Stikeen," I called to Burton. "We're on the second south fork, which we follow to the Stikeen, thence to the left to Telegraph Creek." I began to compose doggerel verses to ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... gives a list of fifty-four places near Warwick which had been wholly or partially depopulated before about 1486.[114] For the sixteenth century, we have the evidence of numerous statutes, the returns of the commissions, doggerel verse, popular insurrections, sermons, etc. Miss Leonard's study of the seventeenth-century enclosures is confirmed by additional evidence presented by Gonner that the movement was unchecked in this period. In 1692, for ...
— The Enclosures in England - An Economic Reconstruction • Harriett Bradley
... doggerel rhymes are not quite representative of the book, as the well-known "Three children sliding on the ice upon a summer's day" appears herein. The "cuts" are distinctively notable, especially the Crocodile (which contradicts ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... can write something worthy of being read, while a mere verse-maker, like yourself, writes only doggerel, that is not worth the paper on which it is printed. Now I advise you to let verse-making alone, and attend closely to your business, both for your own sake and ...
— The Printer Boy. - Or How Benjamin Franklin Made His Mark. An Example for Youth. • William M. Thayer
... what is to be done after his death is violently and persistently opposed by all who survive him, is it not a good opportunity to suggest that perhaps respect has been paid for a long enough time to the doggerel ...
— Shakespeare's Bones • C. M. Ingleby
... with a list of my works. Here is an article on the writings of Victor Hugo, another on an American book called "Confessions of a Poet," a whole heap of verses, among which sundry doggerel epistles to you; and last, not least, the present voluminous prose ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... these doggerel lines excited Jack Vance's wrath above measure, the last verse especially raising his anger to boiling-point, so that it fairly bubbled over. Jack was a loyal-hearted youngster; he was nothing to Allingford, but Allingford was ...
— The Triple Alliance • Harold Avery
... as I saw them yesterday evening, listening to the crooning of an ancient female gutter-snipe, a dun-coloured heap of decrepit wretchedness, chanting the great future of the Irish Parliament in a picturesque and extraordinary doggerel anent the "larned reprisintatives of the Oirish na-a-tion. Promiscu-o-ous they shtand in em-u-la-a-tion." The small shopkeepers, once ardent Nationalists, seem to be changing their minds. One of them confided to me the fact ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... entirely new to several of their number, to view the manner of collecting the fluid. A fine, powerful voice aroused them from their momentary silence, as it rang under the branches of the trees, singing the following words of that inimitable doggerel, whose verses, if extended, would reach from the Caters of the Connecticut to the shores of Ontario. The tune was, of course, a familiar air which, although it is said to have been first applied to this nation in derision, circumstances have since rendered so glorious that no American ever hears ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... and uneven quality. In it, however, that loveable freshness of personality, which his philosophical dejection never quenched, is everywhere in evidence. It is clear that he did not set himself to master the poet's art, yet through the mask of conventional verse which often falls into doggerel, the voice of a true poet is heard. In selecting the pieces for this volume I have put in the vigorous sea verses of John Marr in their entirety and added those others from his Battle Pieces, Timoleon, etc., that best ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... the outing were quickly completed. With the Rover boys went their old school chums, "Songbird" Powell, who was always making up doggerel which he called poetry; Hans Mueller, already introduced, and Fred Garrison. The houseboat was a large one, and to make the trip more pleasant, the boys invited two ladies to go along, Mrs. Stanhope and Mrs. Laning. With Mrs. Stanhope came her only daughter, Dora, whom Dick Rover thought the ...
— The Rover Boys on the Plains - The Mystery of Red Rock Ranch • Arthur Winfield
... says the Dean, wrathfully, "and might have had both wealth and fame had his love for King James not turned his head. I have heard much of the colonies, and have read that doggerel 'Sot Weed Factor' which tells of the gluttonous life of ease you lead in your own province. You can have no men of mark from such conditions, Mr. Carvel. Tell me," he adds contemptuously, "is genius honoured ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... upon this occasion had fallen upon the most famous of the old halls. Of the performance I remember a topical song which evoked enthusiastic applause. It was an incredibly stupid piece of doggerel about England's position in the world; and the shiny-faced exquisite who declaimed it strutted to and fro like a bantam cock at each fresh roar of applause from the heated house. When he used the word "fight" he waved an imaginary sword and ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... it be done in wholesome rhymes," returned the baronet. "You ought to know that you are expected even to speak in doggerel." ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... pious and unexceptionable doggerel and no one would admit such fact more quickly than Mistress Anne herself, who laid it away in after days in her drawer, with a smile at the metre and a sigh for the miserable time it chronicled. There were many of them, for among ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... and micro-organic chemistry," Aaron broke in. "The reactions of cell-elements to the doggerel punch of the wave-lengths of sunlight, the foundation of all folk-songs and rag-times. Terrence completes his circle right there and stultifies all his windiness. Now listen to ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... sometimes written in doggerel rhyme. While granting the new certificate law, the Assembly were careful to pass a minor ecclesiastical statute enforcing a fine of from six to twelve shillings upon all who should neglect to observe all ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... no particular plan of reform to propose, but is nevertheless thoroughly dissatisfied with the world as it is. Lastly, a series of vague appeals to revolt, written in the vernacular, partly in prose, partly in doggerel rhyme, have been preserved and seem to testify to a deliberate propaganda of lawlessness. Some of the general causes of this rising tide of discontent are quite apparent. The efforts to enforce the statutes of laborers, ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... issue, I helped, with other Whig boys, to raise ash-poles, and to hurrah lustily for Clay at public meetings. On the other hand, the Democratic boys hurrahed as lustily around their hickory poles and, as was finally proved, to much better purpose. They sang doggerel which, to me, was blasphemous, and especially a song ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... translation when a song or operatic excerpt of foreign origin is rendered in English. Of grand opera even the Daily Telegraph is moved to say that "the translations are in most cases literary nightmares." Mere baldness might be excused, and even doggerel overlooked, but one has only to turn to almost any of the current standard translations of foreign songs to see that the matter is worse than this. To expect a student to get up and participate in this verbal foolishness and ineptitude, by endeavouring to express as genuine ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... English Poetry with intelligence, interest, and appreciation. To teach any one how to read a verse so as to mark the metre on the one hand, without on the other hand converting the metrical line into a monotonous doggerel, is not so easy a task as might be supposed. Many of the rules stated in this Part have been found of practical utility in teaching pupils to hit the mean. Rules and illustrations have therefore been given, and the different kinds of metre and varieties ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... from me, and began to invent doggerel, parodying this precious incantation. But Severance did not seem to enjoy the joke, and it grows tiresome to enact one's own farce and do one's ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... had Lessons for breakfast, and Sums for my tea, Learnt to play the Arithmetic nicely, And gained all the prizes at School—don't you see, For construing Doggerel concisely. ...
— Dick, Marjorie and Fidge - A Search for the Wonderful Dodo • G. E. Farrow
... William Hope. It must have been a distressing moment for Flinders, despite the intense excitement of action, when his friend and commander fell; it was indeed, as will be seen, a crucial moment in his career. A doggerel bard of the time enshrined the event in a verse as badly in need of surgical aid as were the heroes ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... but except for the grape arbor and a great quantity of empty bottles in the cellar, no clue was found. Apparently, however, the vanished ginarchist (for so Chuff called him) had been writing poetry before his departure. The following rather inscrutable doggerel was found scrawled on a ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... to Kinmont Willie, I merely give such reasons as I can find for thinking that Scott HAD "mangled" fragments of an old ballad before him, and did not merely paraphrase the narrative of Walter Scott of Satchells, in his doggerel True History of the Name of ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... had an unrelenting sincerity which often turned into severity. Yet he had much tenderness. He had a soul like a Red Indian's—all tomahawk and truth, until the literary passion came and added humour to it. He demands in his vigorous doggerel:— ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... besides) stayed away from home till twelve o'clock at night, from ten o'clock till the aforesaid hour, I being in the presence and company of M. Cannabich, his wife and daughter, the Herrn Schatzmeister, Ramm, and Lang, making doggerel rhymes with the utmost facility, in thought and word, but not in deed. I should not, however, have conducted myself in so reckless a manner if our ringleader, namely, the so-called Lisel (Elisabeth Cannabich), had not inveigled and instigated me to mischief, ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
... Dr. Steingass writes to me, "The verses in Al-Hayfa and Yusuf, where not mere doggerel, are spoiled by the spelling. I was rarely able to make out even the metre and I think you have accomplished a feat by translating ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... Smythe, whose family lived at the old hall now in the possession of the Layards. This Stella had died at the age of twenty-five in the year 1741, and her tombstone recorded that in mind she was clean and sweet, and in body beautiful. Also at the foot of it was a doggerel couplet, written probably by ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... his name, Papa. I am afraid you might have him flayed alive, while the poor fellow deserves nothing but laughter for his doggerel." And while this doggerel was secretly pressed by her bosom, she stole a look at L'Isle, and was surprised to see how little galled he seemed ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... better than to have set an example of rhyming before Archie Blair. He turned and looked down at the elder, and the sight of him marching peaceably beside Captain Jimmie reminded him of an old doggerel ballad: "But man, there's worse than that written in your own history," ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... Staffordshire.—On the feast of St. Clement's (Nov. 23) the children go round to the various houses in the villages to which they belong singing the following doggerel: ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 217, December 24, 1853 • Various
... reward for the first fellow in," finished Fred. "Caught you that time, Tom, just as you caught Songbird with his doggerel." ...
— The Rover Boys in Camp - or, The Rivals of Pine Island • Edward Stratemeyer
... what I took for a joke of yours is true, and that you are at me in this number of the Quarterly. I have desired Power to send you back my copy when it comes, not liking to read it just now for reasons. In the meantime, here's some good-humoured doggerel for you: ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... separated, as they were in the Primitive Church;[716] he would have a hearty congregational service. When it was seasonable to sing praise to God, they were to do it with the spirit and the understanding also; 'not in the miserable, scandalous doggerel of Sternhold and Hopkins, but in psalms and hymns which are both sense and poetry, such as would sooner provoke a critic to turn Christian than a Christian to turn critic;' they were to sing 'not lolling at ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... for the enclosed doggerel. Last night, round one of our fires, we were alluding to the various uses we have made of that deadly weapon, the bayonet, and it was suggested that I, as a Spring Poet, should record them ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... the old James the First graveyard near Peat's Hill may spell out this bit of doggerel, undoubtedly one of the worst recorded of an Elizabethan, on ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... too that doggerel, 'A Noble Personality,' is the most utter trash possible, and it couldn't ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... England, or country in Europe, of which he could not give a very particular account. He had some letters, and was ingenious, but much of an unbeliever, and wickedly undertook, some years after, to travesty the Bible in doggerel verse, as Cotton had done Virgil. By this means he set many of the facts in a very ridiculous light, and might have hurt weak minds if his work had been published; ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... Turner's pictures until Turner's death? Who praised Tennyson's poems until Tennyson was quite an old man? Nay, I am afraid some of us have laughed at those who endeavoured to ask our attention to what we called the daubs of the one or the doggerel of the other. {5}This, I think, should teach us not even to attempt to criticize until we are sure that we appreciate. Yet what a vast amount of criticism there is in the world which errs (like Dr. Johnson) from sheer ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... skit about a bit of doggerel which was then making nights and days unhappy for many undeserving persons who in an evil moment had fallen upon it in some stray newspaper corner. A certain car line had recently adopted the "punch system," and posted in its cars, for the information of ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... temperamental differences of opinion, what is best worth seeing where all is beautiful and inspiring. If I had possessed a little foresight I should have avoided Wales, for, having proved apt at itinerary doggerel, I was solemnly created, immediately on arrival, Mistress of Rhymes and Travelling Laureate to the party—an office, however honourable, that is no sinecure since it obliges me to write rhymed eulogies or diatribes on Dolgelly, Tan-y-Bulch, ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... absolutely and almost entirely in keeping boys for eight or ten years at learning the rules of Latin and Greek grammar, construing certain Latin and Greek authors, and possibly making verses which, had they been English verses, would have been condemned as abominable doggerel,—if that is what you mean by liberal education, then I say it is scandalously insufficient and almost worthless. My reason for saying so is not from the point of view of science at all, but from the point of view of literature. I say the thing professes ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... No initiative is required. But it is absolutely essential that a boy should own all these adjuncts and many others—quickness of perception, unlimited daring, and alertness to make a jockey. No truer summing up of the necessary qualifications is there than the old and famous "Father Bill" Daly's doggerel and ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... balayeuse at the bottom of a lady's dress; but, like the balayeuse, it is only meant to be a protection and a finish, and, however precious it may be, it suffers from contact with the dirt, and sooner or later has to be cut out and cast aside, soiled and useless. Some doggerel a friend of mine scribbled on one book in particular describes dozens ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... moral training would have probably prevented. She was lame and singularly ill-favoured, but her manners were spirited and amusing. Her chief employment was the composition of verses, and these she sung as a mode of subsistence. She published, in 1805, a volume of doggerel rhymes, and was in the habit of satirising in verse those who had offended her. Her one happy effort in song-making has preserved her name. She lived chiefly in the neighbourhood of Muirkirk. She died on the 3d November 1821, in her eightieth year, and her remains were interred in the churchyard ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... two lines of indecent doggerel spoken by the Fool at the end of Act I.; the second, of the Fool's prophecy in rhyme at the end of III. ii.; the third, of Edgar's soliloquy at the end of ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... of the merest balderdash and doggerel that it was ever our bad fortune to lay eyes on. The author is a vulgar buffoon, and the editor a talkative, tedious old fool. We use strong language, but should any of our readers peruse the book, (from ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... was, from the first, constantly filled on service-days with eager worshipers. Here she gave exhortations, and prophesied in a species of religious frenzy or convulsion, sometimes uttering very heavy prose, and sometimes the most fearful doggerel rhyme resembling—well—perhaps our album effusions here at home! Indeed, I can think of nothing else equally fearful. In these paroxysms, Joanna raved like an ancient Pythoness whirling on her tripod, and to just about the same purpose. Yet, it was astonishing to see how the thing went down. ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... been the fashion to call Bunyan's verse doggerel; but no verse is doggerel which has a sincere and rational meaning in it. Goethe, who understood his own trade, says that the test of poetry is the substance which remains when the poetry is reduced to prose. Bunyan had infinite invention. His mind was full of objects which he ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... was enough to provoke an excess of poetry. The character and manner of the verse might vary with the predisposing cause. A gentleman who had dined too freely might disexpand himself in a short fit of lyric doggerel in which "bowl" and "soul" were freely rhymed. The morning's indigestion inspired a long-drawn elegiac, with "bier" and "tear," "mortal" and "portal" linked in sonorous sadness. The man of politics, from time to time, grateful to an appreciative country, sang back to it, "Ho, Albion, ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... verse if not into poetry as a medium. Serious epistles had—of course on classical models—been written in verse for a long time. But now in England more modern patterns, and especially Anstey's New Bath Guide, started the fashion of actual correspondence in doggerel verse with no thought of print—a practice in which persons as different as Madame d'Arblay's good-natured but rather foolish father, and a poet and historian like Southey indulged; and which did not become obsolete till Victorian times, if then. At the present ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... if the first Latin work had not been in rhyme, I should have got on but badly in that; but, as it was, I hummed and sang it to myself readily enough. In the same way we had a geography in memory-verses, in which the most wretched doggerel best served to fix the recollection of that which was to ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... lost each other and new and cant phrases of a dimly understood theology have displaced the older sentiment. Once in a while we catch a strange word of an unknown tongue, as the "Mighty Myo," which figures as a river of death; more often slight words or mere doggerel are joined to music of singular sweetness. Purely secular songs are few in number, partly because many of them were turned into hymns by a change of words, partly because the frolics were seldom heard by the stranger, and ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... he accepted the challenge and repeated the doggerel as he planted his bare feet in the water. She splashed him and he retaliated, but the boy, though smaller, was agile, and in an unguarded moment he caught the girl by the wrists and pushed her so she sat squarely in the shallow ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... wavering allegiance. The crowd which always relished his grandiloquence, voted him into office with a shout, and cheered his soaring periods to their peroration. A quartet of young voters now proceeded in catchy doggerel to laud the virtues of the party and the commanding genius of its candidates, thereby giving the blown doctor a much-needed respite. He came up in good form presently, winged another flight with Shelby's name as its climax, and while Mrs. Hilliard split a new pair ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... distasteful things? And if so, are we to regard it as the highest of motives to moral action? In the days when Kant's idea of the "moral imperative" was in the ascendant, the belief got abroad that the essence of virtue was to do what you hated doing. Looking back to my Oxford days, I recall some doggerel lines, of German origin, in which this belief finds apt expression. A disciple who is in trouble about his soul says ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... only in the outward material with which he worked that John Bunyan had much in common with the romance and poetry of England. He could indeed write verses which, for sheer doggerel, it would be difficult to match, but in spite of that there was the authentic note of poetry in him. Some of his work is not only vigorous, inspiring, and full of the brisk sense of action, but has an unconscious strength and worthiness of style, whose compression and terseness have fulfilled ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... never received; and Evelyn might have had the honour of knighthood of the Bath, but declined it. He was present at the Coronation in Westminster Abbey on St. George's Day, 1661, and had prepared and printed a Panegyric poem on the occasion, a screed of bombastic doggerel in fulsome praise of the King. He was a frequent visitor at the Court, and loved to sun himself in the royal presence. One of the finest examples of this feature of Evelyn's character is his Fumifugium, published in 1661, which will ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... that John built, represented by a stealthy seedy gentleman, who, after reading a board intimating that apartments were to let, crept slyly past the sleepy Bull, to mount the house-steps; and there deliver himself of the following doggerel, ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... walked around the little room his eyes caught some writing on the wall. There were several bits of doggerel, one ...
— The Mystery at Putnam Hall - The School Chums' Strange Discovery • Arthur M. Winfield
... there truer utterance in a certain range of idiosyncrasy than by this poet. Hardly a piece of his, large or small, but has "snap" and raciness. He puts in cantering rhyme (often doggerel) much cutting irony and idiomatic ear-cuffing of the kirk-deacons—drilygood-natured addresses to his cronies, (he certainly would not stop us if he were here this moment, from classing that "to the De'il" among them)—"to Mailie and her Lambs," "to auld Mare Maggie," ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... do you know you lie at peace?' Lawford audibly questioned, gazing at the doggerel. And yet, as his eyes wandered over the blunt green stone and the rambling crimson-berried brier that had almost encircled it with its thorns, the echo of that whisper rather jarred. He was, he supposed, ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... a rising one. This is especially true on the last syllable of the last word, "tip." The counting out is not very different from that of white children. They all place two fingers of each hand in a circle; the one who repeats the doggerel, having one hand free, touches each finger in the circle saying, Hony, kee bee, l[a] [a]-weis, ag-les, huntip. Each finger that the huntip falls on is doubled under, and this is repeated again and again until there are but three fingers left. The persons ...
— Contribution to Passamaquoddy Folk-Lore • J. Walter Fewkes
... witch and fairy matter will remark a deficiency of spectres and enchantments, and complain that the whole is rather dull. Cultivated free-thinkers, again, well knowing that no ghosts or elves exist in this country, will smile at the crack-brained dreamer, with his spelling-book prose and doggerel verse, and dismiss him good-naturedly as a German Lake poet." "In these works," says Heine, "there reigns a mysterious intenseness, a peculiar sympathy with nature, especially with the vegetable and mineral kingdoms. The reader feels himself transported into an enchanted ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... the steps, rang the bell, and ran away. Daniel wrote his own valentine; but, despite its originality, that document gave him no such comfort as Billy got from twenty-five cents' worth of embossed paper, pink cupids, and doggerel. Finally, Billy announced to me that he had been to play with Jimmy, and got introduced ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... doggerel, done into speech): "To thee, O Lord, we poor folk make moan; the Devil has sown his seeds in this land! Law thy hand created for protection of thy children: but where now is Law? Widows and orphans weep that the Princes do not unite to have ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... deceive, the popular Muse, of 1714-1730, was not attempting deception. Ballads of the eighteenth century were sarcastic, as in those on Sheriffmuir and in Skirving's amusing ballad on Preston Pans, or were mere doggerel, or were brief songs to old tunes. They survive in print, whether in flying broadsides or in books, but, popular as is 'The Queen's Marie,' in all its many variants (Child gives no less than eighteen), ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... into a readable compass leaving out their useless verbiage, and putting them in a poetic form, as poetry best expresses the essence and spirit of an author's thought. I think the learned gentlemen, if they could peruse these doggerel rhymes, would acknowledge that their meaning has been expressed even more plainly and forcibly than in their own prose. The reader will observe that of the whole twenty-three only two appear to have any knowledge on ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various
... politely—"McTurk"—the Irishman scowled—"and, of course, the unspeakable Beetle, our friend Gigadibs." Abanazar, the Emperor, and Aladdin had more or less of characters, and King passed them over. "Come forth, my inky buffoon, from behind yonder instrument of music! You supply, I presume, the doggerel for this entertainment. Esteem yourself to be, as it ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... many of of whom know nothing of India, except that it occupies a certain space in the map of the world, these notes were absolutely necessary to understand the work. Finally, as I am no poet, and have a most thorough contempt for the maker of mere doggerel rhymes, I have translated the pieces of poetry, which are interspersed in the original, into plain ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli
... coming to inspire war doggerel; the prospect of a new crop of war stories and war plays is too painful. We were all brought up on the Civil War and are resigned to its literature. But life is too short to get used ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... the Dutch in the Cape Colony? Our second document will enlighten us on this point. It is an invitation, composed in doggerel rhyme, to the Boer forces to invade Griqualand West, signed by the chairman of a district branch of the Afrikander Bond. The date is not given; but as the proclamation under which Head-Commandant C. J. Wessels annexed the districts in question is dated November ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... arms for a woodcut and furnishing a frontispiece to his translation of Eusebius' "Life of St. Jerome." He was, moreover, a poet, author of "an often-translated song"; he wrote verses to discourage Duerer from spending his time in producing the doggerel rhymes which at one time he was moved to attempt,—framing poems of didactic import, and publishing one or two on separate sheets with a woodcut at the top, in spite of the inappreciative reception given to them by Spengler and Pirkheimer. Besides Spengler, there were "Christopher ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... had their time of it. They showered in caricatures and doggerel by the barrel. None enjoyed these more than the doctor himself. By his direction the funniest of the cartoons were pasted against the wall of the gallery in which the doctor slept and the watchers sat. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... and dank scrap of paper from beneath her apron. Of a truth she could not read its contents, for they were writ in English in the form of a doggerel rhyme which caused Chauvelin ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... without honor, but in the sister country we find him denounced by ordinance together with "rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars." The London stalls were fed by Grub-street authors with penny ballads—trash for the greater part—printed in black-letter on broadsides. Many of these doggerel productions were collected into small miscellanies, known as Garlands, in the reign of James I.; but few of the genuine old folk-songs found a refuge in print. Yet they still lived on in corners of England and Scotland, where "the spinsters and the ...
— Ballad Book • Katherine Lee Bates (ed.)
... not less cordial and sincere, and poetic effusions flowed in a gushing stream. But none of these verses, doggerel and otherwise, expressed more felicitously the general feeling than those which had been written some years before by Henry J. Byron—(who had himself attempted to establish a rival to Punch, but had been crushed by the greater weight)—one ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... remaining five hundred-something miles, alone...! He just barely managed to accomplish it... There was still a little juice, from his chemical cell, feeding his helmet phone... Now, he thought he heard someone singing raucously one of those improvised doggerel songs of spacemen ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... drifted—a demented man. I found myself in a house of kindly people, who had found me on the third day wandering, weeping, and raving through the streets of St. John's Wood. They have told me since that I was singing some insane doggerel about "The Last Man Left Alive! Hurrah! The Last Man Left Alive!" Troubled as they were with their own affairs, these people, whose name, much as I would like to express my gratitude to them, I may not ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... Miller and his Men," great was our exultation. This piece and "Blue Beard" were our "battle horses," to which we afterwards added a lugubrious melodrama called "The Gypsy's Curse" (it had nothing whatever to do with "Guy Mannering"), of which I remember nothing but some awful doggerel, beginning with— ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... enemy, the mercenaries, who had little stomach for fight without wages, accepted the passports proffered by Parma. They revenged themselves for the harsh treatment which they had received from Casimir and from the states-general, by singing, everywhere as they retreated, a doggerel ballad—half Flemish, half German—in which their wrongs ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... I can quote the hymns if they've got any merit at all. Otherwise I shall drag in the psalms. Hymns aren't very quotable as a rule. Shocking doggerel most of 'em!..." ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... by entering into the psychology of the period that we can estimate its attitude towards the poetry written by the pioneers themselves. The "Bay Psalm Book" (1640), the first book printed in the colonies, is a wretched doggerel arrangement of the magnificent King James Version of the Psalms, designed to be sung in churches. Few of the New England churches could sing more than half-a-dozen tunes, and a pitch-pipe was for a long time the only musical instrument allowed. Judged as hymnology or poetry, ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... of doggerel was not one to be desired, and, furthermore, that she was not a muffin, nor anything in ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... Presley could not tell whether what he had written was true poetry or doggerel. He distrusted profoundly his own judgment. He must have the opinion of some one else, some one competent to judge. He could not wait; to-morrow would not do. He must know to a certainty before he could rest ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... of a tear dropped to the memory of the lost Occidental. The idea (not the chief idea, but the vehicle that bears it) was probably suggested by the old song called "The Raging Canal," but I cannot remember now. I do remember, though, that at that time I thought my doggerel was one of the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... did not care for Chiari as an author, and M. Zorzi had in his pay people who, without pity, rhyme, or reason, hissed all the compositions of the ecclesiastical playwright. My part was to criticise them in hammer verses—a kind of doggerel then much in fashion, and Zorzi took care to distribute my lucubrations far and wide. These manoeuvres made me a powerful enemy in the person of M. Condulmer, who liked me none the better for having all the appearance of being in high favour ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... 'printed bookes' have survived to the present time, and it has been contended that they were probably nothing more than ballads and copies of doggerel verses. But this is an hypercritical objection, or rather groundless guess, for it is evident that the proclamation points at something far more important. We may safely conclude that they were ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... the Irishman of the company—a happy, reckless, facetious dog, who had lost little save his liberty and cared nothing for his life, but laughed and cheated and joked and made doggerel songs on every disaster that befell them. He made ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... (This doggerel came in answer to a question whether the Spirits could write poetry, and is in a hand not dissimilar to the preceding communication, although the ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission
... means something the very opposite of complimentary. A surly person is said to have "a dogged disposition." Any one very much fatigued is said to be "dog weary." A wretched room or house is often called "a dog hole," or said to be only fit for "a dog." Very poor verse is "doggerel." It is told of Lady Mary Wortley Montague, that when a young nobleman refused to translate some inscription over an alcove, because it was in "dog-latin," she observed, "How strange a puppy shouldn't ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... keenness in the chalk streams of Hampshire, in the salmon rivers of Ireland, in the desolate tarns on the Welsh mountains. In the visitors' book of the inn at Pen-y-gwryd, Tom Hughes, Tom Taylor, and he left alternate quatrains of doggerel to celebrate their stay, written currente calamo, as the spirit prompted them. This is Charles ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... common with two or three other villages in the neighbourhood, its Christmastide mummers and waits. The mummers, who go their rounds in daytime, are men dressed as women. They carry a small doll in a box ornamented with pieces of evergreen and chant doggerel rhymes. ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... of Cranmer found its perfection in the solemn music of the Prayer-book of Edward VI. The translations of the Bible made no great advance on Wiclif. In the realm of verse, John Skelton was a powerful satirist with a unique manipulation of doggerel which has permanently associated a particular type of rhyme with his name; an original and versatile writer was Skelton, but without that new critical sense of style which was to become so marked a feature of the great literary outburst under Elizabeth. Herein, ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... shrugged her shoulders. "The same things do not charm everybody," said she. "It seemed to me no better than that Methodist doggerel. The latter half, at ...
— Out in the Forty-Five - Duncan Keith's Vow • Emily Sarah Holt
... anticipated our best thinking; but usually the world has failed in {4} any effort to adopt their high standards. Speaking roughly, several centuries of charitable practice, in the English world at least, are fairly well summed up in the doggerel verses of that sixteenth-century divine, quoted by Hobson, who counselled ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... Most commonly, the narratives took the form of long rhyming poems; not because the people in those days were so poetical—indeed, some of these poems would be thought, in present times, very dreary doggerel—but because rhyme is easier to remember than prose. Story-tellers had generally much the same stock-in-trade—stories of Arthur, Charlemagne, Sir Guy of Warwick, Sir Bevis of Southampton, and so on. If a minstrel ...
— Stories from Le Morte D'Arthur and the Mabinogion • Beatrice Clay
... the panorama of the fair city below. Then I read aloud the first two stanzas of Old Pictures in Florence, and realised for the thousandth time the definiteness of Browning's poetry. This particular poem is a mixture of art and doggerel; but even the latter is interesting ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... also had her dedicatory poem. Some years later, when, it seems, she wanted to go to Harrogate, and hoped in vain for the escort of a Mr. Best, Jane presented her with a copy of doggerel—and probably almost extemporaneous—verses:— ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... Arcadia, and given to celebrating in verse every incident in the noble household of Valdu, from its lady's name-day to the death of a pet canary; but his own tastes inclined to the elegant Bettinelli, whose Lettere Virgiliane had so conclusively shown Dante to be a writer of barbarous doggerel; and among the dilettanti of the day one heard less of Raphael than of Carlo Maratta, less of Ariosto and Petrarch than of the Jesuit poet Padre Cevo, author of the sublime "heroico-comic" poem ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... paper in his hand and read it aloud. It contained some lines of a very rugged doggerel, hardly even rhyming, written in a gross character, and most uncouthly spelt. With the spelling somewhat bettered, this is how ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... poet, who was clearly a man of vivid imagination and spontaneous genius, at once struck up a doggerel rhyme; all of them taking up the chorus as they marched along on ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... I have been privileged to explore is not the product of superstition and slow time, but a deliberately manufactured growth of comparatively recent origin. It is concerned with Barbara, not the impersonal lady who figures in the old logic-book doggerel, but an extremely live and highly illogical person to whom for half a decade I have had the honour to be father. It is also concerned with Barbara's Aunt Julia and, in a lesser degree, with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 17, 1920 • Various
... of a disturbed gander, and pelted me with stones. But two can play at that game, and that boy will think twice before he lapidates a full-grown Christian again. But he will hate him for evermore, and when he has reached man's estate will teach his son to repeat the doggerel: "The Christian to the hook, the Jew to the spit, and the Moslem ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... lifting the dull monotony of imprisonment brought to light many talents for camaraderie which amused not only the suffrage prisoners but the "regulars." Locked in separate cells, as in the District Jail, the suffragists could still communicate by song. The following lively doggerel to the tune of "Captain Kidd" was sung in chorus to the accompaniment of a hair comb. It became a saga. Each day a new verse was added, relating the day's particular controversy with ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... month ago Mr. T. P. O'Connor published in the Sunday Sun some doggerel verses entitled 'The Shamrock,' and had the amusing impertinence to append my name to them as their author. As for some years past all kinds of scurrilous personal attacks had been made on me in Mr. O'Connor's newspapers, ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... stranger the first thing I do: I cannot doubt but to find a welcome, since she is a banished woman, without friends or protection; and especially, when she shall see how civilly you have handled her here, in your doggerel ballad: I will teach you to be a wit, sir; and so your humble servant.'—And leaving him almost wild with his fears, he went directly to Sylvia, where he told her his nephew was going to make up the match between himself and madam the widow of —— and that he ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... event is described in the metrical history of Rouen, composed by a minstrel ycleped Poirier, the limper. This little tract is a chap-book at Rouen: most towns, in the north of France and Belgium, possess such chronicle ballads in doggerel rhyme, which are much read, and eke chaunted, ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... the Hall are full of surprises even to those familiar with Crabbe's earlier poems. He can still allow couplets to stand which are perilously near to doggerel; and, on the other hand, when his deepest interest in the fortunes of his characters is aroused, he rises at times to real eloquence, if never to poetry's supremest heights. Moreover, the poems contain passages of description which, for truth ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... in which this bulky volume of obscene doggerel was published, Wycherley formed an acquaintance of a very singular kind. A little, pale, crooked, sickly, bright-eyed urchin, just turned of sixteen, had written some copies of verses in which discerning judges could detect the promise of future eminence. There was, indeed, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Mr. Charteris; "but that is because she is getting worried about her interest in you. And what is the meaning of this, by the way? I found it on your table this morning." He read the doggerel aloud with an unkindly and uncalled-for ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... was his impression of the doggerel that for an instant he thought he heard the sing-song of his father's tuneless voice. In sharp, clean-cut pictures his memory reproduced the night John Beaudry had last chanted the lullaby and that other picture of the Homeric fight of ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... enrolled among us. The public insist on being admitted to his history, and their curiosity will not go unsatisfied. [Cheers.] His letters are hunted up, his journals are sifted; his sayings in conversation, the doggerel which he writes to his brothers and sisters are collected, and stereotyped in print. [Laughter.] His fate overtakes him. He cannot escape from it. We cry out, but it does not appear that men sincerely resist the liberty which is taken ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... mind, even in this carriage to-day, with these animated companions, and in all this tribulation, ruin, and flight, here was a harrying instance: that every minute or two, whatever the soul's outer preoccupation or inner anguish, there would, would, would return, return and return the doggerel words and swaggering old tune of that song abhorred by the gruff General, but which had first awakened the love of so many hundreds of brave men for its brave, gay ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... his intellect, no less than that of his pocket, to his children. Wealth might be acquired by 'luck,' but proper cultivation was the birthright of every child born of cultivated parents. We learned Latin and Greek by having him talk and read them to us. He wrote doggerel rhymes of history which took the place of Mother Goose. He also told us 'bed-time stories' of history, and read classics to us after supper. When there was company, we were brought down from the nursery so that we might profit by ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... The doggerel, gotten up on the spur of the moment, struck the fancy of fully a score of boys, big and little, and in an instant all were singing it over and over again, at the top of their lungs, and at this those who did not sing ...
— The Rover Boys In The Mountains • Arthur M. Winfield
... the little boy seems to have confused the real valley that interested him so with Scott's ideal Glendearg, and, partly for this reason, to have found a greater pleasure in "The Monastery," which he thereupon undertook to paraphrase in verse. There remain some hundreds of doggerel rhymes; but his affection for that particular novel survived the fatal facility of his octosyllabics, and reappears time after time ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... during the night; the companies had scoured the streets singing some doggerel, which one of the bloody wretches, being in poetic vein, had composed, the ...
— Massacres Of The South (1551-1815) - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the doggerel was largely drowned in the scuffle that ensued, but Katy managed to get "Johnny Carter" out in a shrill treble that carried far, in spite of the hands ...
— Chicken Little Jane • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... "little language," using all sorts of quaint and babyish words and strange strings of capital letters, M. D., for instance, meaning my dears, M. E., Madam Elderly, or D. D., Dear Dingley, and so on. Throughout, too, we come on little bits of doggerel rimes, bad puns, simple jokes, mixed up with scraps of politics, with threatenings of war, with party quarrels, with all kinds of stray fragments of news which bring the life of the times vividly before us. The letters ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... saying meant, "His (the ass's) lips hold thistles and lettuces to be both alike;" wanting the discrimination to distinguish between them. Or, if I may put it into a doggerel rhyme: ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 186, May 21, 1853 • Various
... largely, and spoke little, but Tree had discovered that under his placid exterior he concealed a vein of limitless vanity. One evening "Mr. Smith" startled the club by breaking his habitual silence, and bursting into poetry. Apropos of nothing at all, he suddenly declaimed two lines of doggerel, which, as far as my memory goes, ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... was to Tezcuco, across the lake in a canoe, just as we had been before. We noticed on our way to the canoes, a church, apparently from one to two centuries old, with the following doggerel inscription in huge letters over the portico, which shows that the dogma of the Immaculate Conception is by no means ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... as if sin were a species of ground game—never failed to thrill her with enjoyable disgust. She knew a great portion of the Methodist hymn-book by heart, and pondered long over the interesting preface to that work, wondering much what "doggerel" and "botches" could be—she inclined to the supposition that the former were animals and the latter were diseases; but even her vivid imagination failed to form a satisfactory representation of such ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... effort through the pulpits Heerbrand at Tubingen and Dieterich at Marburg Maestlin at Heidelberg Buttner, Vossius, Torreblanca, Fromundus Father Augustin de Angelis at Rome Reinzer at Linz Celichius at Magdeburg Conrad Dieterich's sermon at Ulm Erni and others in Switzerland Comet doggerel Echoes from New ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... faults to kind oblivion he'll consign; Nor to thy merit will his praise refuse. Thou may'st be searched for polish'd words and verse By flippant spouter, emptiest of praters: Tell him to seek them in some mawkish verse: My periods all are rough as nutmeg graters. The doggerel poet, wishing thee to read, Reject not; let him glean thy jests and stories. His brother I, of lowly sembling breed: Apollo grants to few Parnassian glories. Menac'd by critic with sour furrowed brow, Momus or Troilus ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... a suppliant for alms, begging, as Erasmus begged, not in the name of charity, but of learning, makes itself heard both in the rhyme and rhythm of the original Latin. I have tried to follow the sing-song doggerel. ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... who had come in, sang a long English doggerel about a poor scholar who went to Maynooth and had great success in his studies, so that he was praised by the bishop. Then he went home for his holiday, and a young woman who had great riches asked him into her parlour and told him it was no fit life for a fine young man to be a ...
— In Wicklow and West Kerry • John M. Synge
... was so fortunate as to secure a second edition of Henry Crabb Robinson's Diary was in better case than he who had bothered himself to obtain a first. When it fell in with his mood to argue against that which he himself most affected, he would quote the childish bit of doggerel beginning 'The first the worst, the second the same,' and then grow eloquent over the dainty Templeman Hazlitts which are chiefly third editions. He thought it absurd to worry over a first issue ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... knows," he thought moodily, "how long they will go on intoning their dreary Latin doggerel? Priestcraft and Sham! There's no escape from it anywhere, not even in the wilds of Caucasus! I wonder if the man I seek is really here, or whether after all I have been misled? There are so many contradictory stories told about him ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... and widely circulated poem of colonial New England was Michael Wigglesworth's Day of Doom (1663), a kind of doggerel Inferno, which went through nine editions, and "was the solace," says Lowell, "of every fireside, the flicker of the pine-knots by which it was conned perhaps adding a livelier relish to its premonitions of eternal combustion." Wigglesworth had not the technical ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... lighter chord by quoting Cullingworth's latest article. I must tell you that he is still inflamed by the idea of his own paper, and his brain is in full eruption, sending out a perpetual stream of libellous paragraphs, doggerel poems, social skits, parodies, and articles. He brings them all to me, and my table is already piled with them. Here is his latest, brought up to my room after he had undressed. It was the outcome of some remarks I had made about the difficulty which our far-off ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... sallies—Das Jahrmarktsfest zu Plundersweilern, Ein Schoenbartspiel—was written in March, 1773, and was sent as a birthday gift to Merck—an appropriate recipient. Written in doggerel verse, which Goethe took over from the shoemaker poet Hans Sachs, the piece brings before us the motley crowd of persons who frequented the fairs of the time, each vociferating the cheapness and excellence of his own wares. ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... but it is hardly recognized because of the doggerel meaning, which swamps the music in the farce. And this applies to more important things than the melody. The average reader floats on the surface of this rapid and foamy stream, covered with sticks and straws and flowers and bonbons, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... mar all their worth, all their wit and all their sanctity. Consider, then, what a man he must be, who hath all nine of them and in whom there is neither worth nor wit nor sanctity.' Being questioned whiles what were these nine defaults and having put them into doggerel rhyme, he would answer, 'I will tell you. He's a liar, a sloven, a slugabed; disobedient, neglectful, ill bred; o'erweening, foul-spoken, a dunderhead; beside which he hath divers other peccadilloes, whereof ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... him to take personal cognizance of every region in his Empire: "Ante omnes enitebatur ne quid otiosum vel emeret aliquando vel pasceret." His contempt for slothful self-indulgence finds vent in his reply to the doggerel verses of ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... of a romantic, but refined and gifted poet. As a whole they are singularly free from sexual sensuousness, which is so often a trait in songs of their type. There is an idealism, wonderfully fresh and pure, about them, that is antagonistic to the composer's own assertion that verse often becomes doggerel when harnessed to ...
— Edward MacDowell • John F. Porte
... ever irate Ransom, "that if John Doe and Richard Roe, with a declaration in ejectment, could only be turned into doggerel, he would ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... recasting this doggerel—calling in Vivie to help him as presumably a good scholar in French—got on her nerves, and she was hard put to ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... surprise of posterity at the ephemeral success which they unquestionably achieved. An instance in point is the celebrated poem "Lillibullero," or, as it is sometimes written, "Lilli Burlero." Here is the final stanza of the pitiful doggerel with which Wharton boasted that he had "sung a king ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... cranium—white sheet thrown over his shoulders—is seated astride the ladder, with his back where his face should be—they hoist him upon men's shoulders—and in his hands he carries a long brush, tongs, and poker. A sort of mock proclamation is then made in doggerel verse at the door of all the alehouses in the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, Issue 353, January 24, 1829 • Various
... not—intended, before I saw ground for abstaining, to have, as the phrase is, come in somehow. I think I could manage to bring anything into anything: certainly into a Budget of Paradoxes. Sir W. H. rather piqued himself upon some caniculars, or doggerel verses, which he had put together in memoriam [technicam] of the way in which A E I O are used in logic: he added U, Y, for the addition of meet, etc., to the system. I took the liberty of concocting some counter-doggerel, just to show ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan |
