"Doggerel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 in verse, hence ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... much ability, as Congreve,—and defiled the stage. The Pilgrim's Progress of Bunyan (1628-88) is written in a plain, unaffected style, and is the most popular work of that age. In sharp contrast with Bunyan is Butler's Hudibras, a witty satire, in doggerel verse, upon Puritanism. The principal writer, prior to Queen Anne, is Dryden (1631-1700). We have passed now from the Romantic school of poetry, in which Shakspeare is the most exalted name, to the Classical school. In the age of Queen Anne, Pope (1688-1744), ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... matter of boots the traveller must be able to shoe himself as well as his horses in these wild regions of the west. The explorer indeed should be possessed of a good few accomplishments—amongst these I may enumerate that he should be able to make a pie, shoe himself or his horse, jerk a doggerel verse or two, not for himself, but simply for the benefit or annoyance of others, and not necessarily for publication, nor as a guarantee of good faith; he must be able to take, and make, an observation now and again, mend a watch, kill or cure a horse as the times may require, make ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... a book called Ward's Cantos, written in Hudi-brastic verse; the downfall of the Protestant Establishment, and the exaltation of the Romish Church, in Columbkill's Prophecy, and latterly in that of Pastorini. Gross superstitions, political and religious ballads of the vilest doggerel, miraculous legends of holy friars persecuted by Protestants, and of signal vengeance inflicted by their divine power on those who persecuted them, were in the mouths of the young and old, and of course firmly fixed in ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... "I could not venture on a stanza before you. You cannot imagine what doggerel I make to please ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... But doggerel never solved anything. In truth a very different story is told of the elder and on good authority too. For if we may not trust Sir John Maundeville who tells us that, "Fast by the Pool of Siloe is the elder tree on which Judas ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... doubted. Of that quality the reader shall judge, for I am going to quote a "creation" written under circumstances which, to say the least, were adverse. Before writing these lines I had never attempted verse in my life—barring intentionally inane doggerel. And, as I now judge these lines, it is probably true that even yet I have never written a poem. Nevertheless, my involuntary, almost automatic outburst is at least suggestive of the fervor that was in me. These fourteen lines were written within thirty minutes of the time I first ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... forth the following doggerel (the most acceptable poetry, by the way, of the city), in which the titles of the songs were dragged in, without any regard to order, ...
— The Adventures of a Bear - And a Great Bear too • Alfred Elwes
... forget our tired limbs in a discussion of literary tastes and standards, our workmates had been relieving the treadmill tedium of the long afternoon by various expedients. The quartet at the table immediately in front of us had been making inane doggerel rhymes upon the names of their workmates, telling riddles, and exchanging nasty stories with great gusto and frequent fits of wild laughter. At another table the forthcoming ball of the "Moonlight Maids" was ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... 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 ...
— Edward MacDowell • John F. Porte
... he would have the men and the women 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 their ease, or in the indecent posture of sitting, but all standing before ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... the formation of the latter. Chinese riddles, by which term we include conundrums, charades, et hoc genus omne, are similar to our own, and occupy quite as large a space in the literature of the country. They are generally in doggerel, of which the following may be taken as a specimen, being like the last ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... which led 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 Florus, who ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... 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
... rifles were slung over the shoulders, and the battalion found voice, first in brisk conversation and exchange of witticisms, then in shouting and song. We have escaped from the tyranny of "Tipperary," none of us sing it now, but that doggerel is replaced by other music-hall abominations which are at present in the full glory of their rocket-reign. A parody of a hymn, "Toiling on," is also popular, and my Jersey mate gave it ...
— The Amateur Army • Patrick MacGill
... to rattle off for my special delectation a doggerel ballad of his own composition. The hero was myself and there was a glowing anticipation of the arrival of a heroine. And as I listened my interest would wax intense at the picture of this world-charming bride illuminating ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... glittered with not over-tasteful finery, the lady sometimes with finery stripped from the altars. Then, glass in hand he might joyously cry, "The sharp sword is my farm and plundering is my plough; earth is my bed, the sky my covering, this cloak is my house, this wine my paradise;" or chant the doggerel stave which said that "when a soldier was born three boors were given him, one to find him food, another to find him a comely lass, a third to go to perdition in his stead." But when the country had been eaten up, when ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... 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
... the secret that that night one of the two was going to raise the veil of the future, and the other the following night. As the clock began striking twelve the fellow-servant began striking the floor with a strap, repeating the doggerel lines ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... in psalmody, has sometimes shown evidences of true poetic feeling. The divine afflatus has occasionally inspired in him some fine thoughts and graceful fancies. His race has produced many writers of terrible doggerel of the monumental class of poetry; but far removed from these there have been some who have composed fine ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... cable was a theme of inspiration for innumerable sermons and a prodigious quantity of doggerel. Among the happier ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... full of thought and feeling which, whatever they may be worth, are his own, without a parental anxiety in regard to the fate of his offspring. And there are few prefaces which do not in some way betray this nervousness. I confess to a respect for even the prefatory doggerel of good Tinker Bunyan—a respect for his paternal tenderness toward his book, not at all for his villainous rhyming. When I saw, the other day, the white handkerchiefs of my children waving an adieu as they sailed away from me, a profound ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... Hopkins' at Geneva, in imitation of the French, during the time of Bourgeois' residence, and took over a number of the French tunes; though they mauled these most unmercifully to bring them down to the measure of their doggerel psalms, yet even after this barbarous treatment Bourgeois' spoilt tunes were still far better than what they made for themselves, and sufficient not only to float their book into credit, but to kindle the confused enthusiasm of subsequent English antiquarians, whose blind leadership ...
— A Practical Discourse on Some Principles of Hymn-Singing • Robert Bridges
... 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 ...
— The Rover Boys on the Plains - The Mystery of Red Rock Ranch • Arthur Winfield
... legend 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
... possibly the distinguished players Kitty Clive and Quin; on the opposite side, behind Harlequin, are figures representing the bad clergy, lawyers, and doctors satirised in the Tragedy; and the whole is balanced by the emergence of the ghost in Hamlet, from a trap door in the foreground. Doggerel verses, at the foot of the print, celebrate the arrival of a bard, "from ye Great Mogul," bringing with him Wit, Humour, and Satyr, and receiving the Queen's "honest ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... author of Why so pale and wan, fond lover? and both the circumstance and the doggerel should be very ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... off both his feet) was met thirty years afterwards by the individual who was first saved in the Cambria. This man was wheeling himself in a go-cart on the race-ground at Lanark, dressed in sailor's costume, and selling papers with a picture of the Kent upon them and some doggerel verses below. As honorary secretary of the "Open-Air Mission" (which provides preachers for streets in towns, and for races and fairs in the country), the "first saved" from the wreck and burning then preached the Gospel to the ...
— The Loss of the Kent, East Indiaman, in the Bay of Biscay - Narrated in a Letter to a Friend • Duncan McGregor
... boyish peal of laughter, complied; and sat down with a very solemn face, his brows uplifted, and sang between the candles to a pathetic air this doggerel:— ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... us, and if not in life, then after he is gone, will be 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 with them. We never ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... September 13, Montrose learned that Leslie was attacking. What followed is uncertain in its details. A so-called "contemporary ballad" is incredibly impossible in its anachronisms, and is modern. In this egregious doggerel we are told that a veteran who had fought at Solway Moss a century earlier, and at "cursed Dunbar" a few years later (or under Edward I.?), advised Leslie to make a turning movement behind Linglie Hill. This is not evidence. Though Leslie may have made such a movement, ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... sound and healthy, well-grown boy and a friend who was with him at "the Shop" says he can remember no apparent trace of unhappiness, and is full of tales of his jokes and his fun, his quaint caricatures and doggerel rhymes, his love of flowers and nature, his hospitalities, and his joy in getting his friends to meet and know and like each other. Though he made no mark at Woolwich he did carry off the prize for the best essay on the South African ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... to 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 it booteth not to speak. But what is most laughable of all his fashions is that, ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... study published in America was that made by Mr. H. Carrington Bolton of the Smithsonian Institute. These rhymes unquestionably originated in old superstitions and rites, including incantations of the old magicians and practices of divination by lot. The doggerel of counting-out rhymes is often traceable to old Latin formulas used for these purposes, a fact that shows the absurdity and artificiality of ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... outhouse, and the yard thereby is guarded by a St Bernard, whose single evil deed was that under one of the obscure impulses of a dog's heart—atoned for by long and self-conscious remorse—he bit the poet; and tried, says one of the friars, to make doggerel of him. The poet, too, lives at the monastery gates, and on monastery ground, in a seclusion which the tidings of the sequence of his editions hardly reaches. There is no disturbing renown to be got among ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... sinners. Don Juan's country-seat. The Spanish breakfast. The eatables and the drinkables. Stronger spirits for the stronger spirits. Ice, through oversight, the only thing lacking. Yank's tame cub. Parodic doggerel by the author on her loss of pets. A miners' dinner-party with but one teaspoon, and that one borrowed. ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... and a scream of hideous laughter burst from the vast throng, as they saw the faces of the last survivors of their enemies peering down at them from the height of the keep. They still piled the brushwood round the base of the tower, and gambolled hand in hand around the blaze, screaming out the doggerel lines which had long been the ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... soiled 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 to ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... 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
... when Ward took up the ditty where she left off and sang it with the rollicking enthusiasm which only a man who has soothed restless cattle on a stormy night can put into the doggerel. ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... and with much inward resentment of the folly of the thing, Salisbury told his tale, and repeated reluctantly the absurd intelligence and the absurder doggerel of the scrap of paper, expecting to hear Dyson burst out ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... is this young man? Most of his ilk have accompanied the snows of yester-year. And a goodly proportion of those who make merry in their room are sure-eyed, well set-up, ruddy, muscular chaps, about whom the average man may jeer and quote slanderous doggerel only at his peril. But somehow or other the average man likes this new type better and does not want to jeer at him, but goes and buys his ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... 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
... memory. I 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 even give here, nevertheless cumbered themselves with me, sheltered ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... music. Thus equipped, they call on the farmer, and inquire, "please, sir, do you want your trees worsled?" They then proceed to the orchard, and encircling one of the largest and best-bearing trees, chant in a low voice a certain doggerel rhyme; and this ended, all shout in chorus, with the exception of the trumpeter, who blows a loud blast. During the ceremony they rap the trees with their sticks. "Thus going from tree to tree, or group to group, they wassail the whole orchard; this finished, they proceed to the house of ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... But these 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 the letterpress, ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... reader never makes nonsense rhymes from sheer gladness of heart,—nursery doggerel to keep time with the rippling of the stream, or the dancing of the sun, or the beating of his heart; the gibberish of delight. As I hummed this nonsense, a trout at least three pounds in weight, whom you would ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... the Professor, and he never allowed an old story to be told in his presence without working in two lines of doggerel which he had composed, and of which he was very proud. So, turning to Robert Wood he said patronizingly, "That was very well told, Robert. The story is an old one, but you worked it up very nicely; but," continued the Professor, ...
— Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks - A Picture of New England Home Life • Charles Felton Pidgin
... some collections of hymns that come pretty near being books of poetry. The improvement in this department of literature within the past twenty-five years has been marked. There is still, indeed, in many hymnals, and especially in hymnals for Sunday schools and social meetings, much doggerel; but large recent contributions of hymns which are true poetry, many of the best of them from American sources, have made it possible to furnish our congregations with admirable ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... "Doggerel! It is divinity," she insisted, flinging a kiss from her finger-tips in Godspeed, as it were, to the banished ballad-maker, as she moved a little further up the steps. Villon followed her. Let come what might come, he was the maid's equal for the moment and ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... leaning towards these things you may depend upon it they are noble, pompous, and fraudulent. And it was delightful, too, for people without a vestige of talent—and even then these were in the majority—people who could just strum a tune or string a few lines of doggerel, to be told that all that distinguishes what used to be called "serious art" from their productions was of no consequence whatever, and that, on the contrary, it was these, if any, that ought to be taken seriously. The output of verse, which was ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... efforts have reached us, were impotent to 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
... things have happened since I saw you! I looked for you in the last spring, little dreaming that so fat and flourishing a 'Statesman' could be overthrown by a little fever. I had even begun some doggerel, announcing to you the advent of the white-bait, which I imagined were likely to be all eaten up in your absence. My memory is so bad that I cannot recollect half a dozen lines, probably not ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... audience by elevating its heels and uttering a characteristic "hee haw." By the side of Busby junior stands the manager (Raymond), apologetically addressing the audience. Certain pamphlets lie scattered in front of the stage, on which are inscribed (among others) the following doggerel:— ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... down his burden in the study, where the Doctor, cautiously guarding against intrusion, wrenched open the chest. His rage and agony may be conceived when he found the treasure transformed into a heap of stones, bearing the following malicious doggerel ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... graduate of Wheaton Seminary of the class of 1866 by John G. Whittier, on the receipt of two pairs of long stockings, which the young woman had knit. She was a frequent visitor in the Whittier home, and often assisted in the entertainment of guests of honor. Mr. Whittier regarded the verses as doggerel, and expressed his intention of writing something worth while for his youthful admirer. But the poem reveals a humorous side of his character, differing from what one finds in his published poetry, and it is probable that ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... 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 to ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... poet 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
... Many a good story is founded on the adventures of land-buyers in their endeavours to evade the spirit and obey the letter of land regulations. In 1891 a rhymester wrote in doggerel somewhat as follows of the experiences of a selector who "took up" ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... anonymous series of letters which had just appeared under the title of "Letters of Obscure Men." In these letters, the general stupidity and arrogance of the monks of the late Middle Ages was exposed in a strange German-Latin doggerel which reminds one of our modern limericks. Erasmus himself was a very learned and serious scholar, who knew both Latin and Greek and gave us the first reliable version of the New Testament, which he translated into Latin together ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... case, there is no use in mincing the matter; Ireland is gone, and the death-blow of England is struck; and this event may happen INSTANTLY—before Mr. Canning and Mr. Hookham Frere have turned Lord Howick's last speech into doggerel rhymne; before "the near and dear relations" have received another quarter of their pension, or Mr. Perceval conducted the Curates' Salary Bill safely to a third reading. If the mind of the English people, cursed as they now are with that madness of ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... 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 ...
— Ballad Book • Katherine Lee Bates (ed.)
... 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, in a ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... little room his eyes caught some writing on the wall. There were several bits of doggerel, one running ...
— The Mystery at Putnam Hall - The School Chums' Strange Discovery • Arthur M. Winfield
... that the present Mr. Lund, of Malsis Hall, was one of my father's principal pupils. Some very good "talent" was turned out in the way of glee parties particularly, and just before Christmas my father used to be very busy training singers for carolling. I often wrote a little doggerel-rhyme to please those who came to the classes. One of my earliest efforts was a few verses anent my first pair of britches, which I, in common, I suppose, with other juveniles, regarded with a great amount of pleasure and pride. I must apologise for introducing ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... common Moorish ornament, Greek mouldings, common flamboyant traceries, common Corinthian and Ionic capitals, and such other work, lines of this declared kind (generally to be classed under the head of "doggerel ornamentation") may be seen in rich profusion; and they are necessarily the only kind of lines which can be felt or enjoyed by persons who have been educated without reference to natural forms; their instincts being blunt, and their eyes actually incapable of perceiving the inflexion of ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... true, but Macaulay's reasons for rejecting it are not quite exact. Reports of Claverhouse's gallantry at Seneff were certainly current during his lifetime. It is mentioned, for example, in a copy of doggerel verses addressed to Claverhouse by some nameless admirer on New Year's Day 1683.[4] And there is yet more particular testimony, though, like the former, it is of that nature which a historian will always feel ...
— Claverhouse • Mowbray Morris
... 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 of Carlyle's French Revolution if it were possible to buy at moderate ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... 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. Above ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... (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
... very few which are not preserved in the British Museum—and a greater tribute to its rarity could not be devised—was called, "A Good Suggestion as to ye Proper Use of ye Chinne Whisker," and consisted of a few lines of doggerel printed beneath a caricature of the king, with the crown hanging from ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... would please Flannigan exceedingly, for he imagined he was quite a poet. He had written some wretched doggerel, in which he had endeavored to embody his thoughts of persons and of personal experiences during the war. He actually thought the wretched stuff was equal to the best efforts of "Tom" Moore. And if any one wished ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... the 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 singer ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... 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 which ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... do, Foster?' I would murmur airily as I swung round a corner. 'Have you seen my new book?'; or, 'I noticed you published that article of mine yesterday!' Presently I found myself in open, scrub-covered country, and singing, quite loudly, the old sailor's doggerel about its being a braw thing to be a 'clairk in an orfiss'; my real thought being that it was a braw thing to be Nicholas Freydon, a clerk in an office, who was very soon to be ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... duty of combining a display of loyalty to their sovereign with a proportionate degree of disloyalty to the captain and owner who were responsible for supplying them with food that even a Russian serf might have felt justified in complaining about. So a doggerel verse was composed and sung fervently to a modified form of the National Anthem by way of intimating their grievance forcefully to the notice of their commander. Relevancy did not come within the compass of ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... of 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
... burned dim; but Cuthbert still sat on beside the rude table where he had supped. Before him lay the scrap of parchment with the doggerel lines of the wise woman inscribed upon them. It had been something of a shock to his faith to find that the wise woman knew all his story beforehand, and had had no need to dive into the spirit world to ask the nature of his errand. ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... attack created found voice in a ballad called 'The Devonshire Boys' Courage, 1690.' It is utter doggerel, but expresses the contemporary views of the people, and was sung to a tune called 'Liggan Water,' a title that, according to Mr William Chappell, refers to an Irish stream. I give only a ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... almost as long since we met) to dedicate to you the very first Book, of whatever size or kind I should publish. Who could have thought that so many years would elapse, without my giving the least signs of life upon the subject of this important promise? Who could have imagined that a volume of doggerel, after all, would be the first offering that Gratitude would lay ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... applications of many odd subjects. Among the headings I found Cooking, Rain, Milk, The Ocean, Temperance, Salve, Dinner, A Mast, Fog, A Net, Pitch, A Rainbow, A Kitchen, etc., etc. It is a mass of pious doggerel, founded on Scripture and ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... 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, ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... Dijon, and perhaps a little of Walsh's Aristophanes, and there is no contemporary verse of the class with which Lowell's may not fearlessly stand a comparison; for, observe, we are not speaking of mock heroics like Bon Gaultier's, which are only a species of parody, but of real doggerel, the Rabelaisque of poetry. The Fable is somewhat on the Ingoldsby model,—that is to say, a good part of its fun consists in queer rhymes, double, treble, or poly-syllabic; and it has even Barham's ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... Well said . . . to thee. Printed in doggerel form in Qq, the lines ending with hands, ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... cards; more than several, in fact; no fewer than five were sent in one day. Dr. Lueger read some of them, and described others. Some of them had pictures on them; one a picture of a hog with a monstrous snout, and beside it a squirting soda-siphon; below it some sarcastic doggerel. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... rubbish that is put forward as a 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 ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... window, and, getting into bed again, tried to compose her limbs into absolute repose, as the doctor had advised her to do. And then, just as she was mercifully going to sleep, there floated in, through the open window, a variant on a doggerel song she ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... Pratt's coffin. However, she won't care! Won't it be nice to get rid of these frail, troublesome bodies of ours, and live without them! I hope I shall see you in heaven, with plenty of room and no rheumatism. How could you make such a time over that doggerel! [12] Such things are a drug in this house. I thought I had a long letter from you, and it was that stuff! My last book is all printed. My husband kindly corrected the proof-sheets for me; a thing I hate to do. He likes the book ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... himself incapable of properly appreciating it. Notice, for example, his remark on the lovely poem of the Fakir at the end of the story of "Abu Al-Hasan and Abu Ja'afer the Leper," the two versions of which we gave on a preceding page. Burton calls it "sad doggerel," and, as he translates it, so it is. But Payne's version, with its musical subtleties and choice phrases, such as "The thought of God to him his very housemate is," is a delight to the ear and an enchantment of the sense. Mr. Payne in his Terminal Essay ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... 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 corresponding to these ...
— Contribution to Passamaquoddy Folk-Lore • J. Walter Fewkes
... 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 the subject, the famous A. R. Wallace and the brilliant ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various
... 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. ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... ... You yourself seem to labour under some delusion as to the merits of Lord B.'s poetry, and treat the wretched verses, the Fare Well, with far too much respect. They are disgusting in sentiment, and in execution contemptible. 'Though my many faults deface me,' etc. Can worse doggerel than such a stanza be written? One verse is commendable: 'All my madness none can know.'" The criticism, as criticism, confutes itself, and is worth quoting solely because it displays the feeling of a sane ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... Ilyitch the verses and didn't say who was the author. But I am convinced that he guessed, though he won't own it to this day, and declares he had no idea. But he says that on purpose. Pyotr Ilyitch began to laugh at once, and fell to criticizing it. 'Wretched doggerel,' he said they were, 'some divinity student must have written them,' and with such vehemence, such vehemence! Then, instead of laughing, your friend flew into a rage. 'Good gracious!' I thought, 'they'll fly at each other.' 'It was I who wrote them,' ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... from a well-known poem, a popular song, a nursery rhyme, or even doggerel verse. Sometimes a whole poem or song prefaces an article. When the verse is printed in smaller type than the article, it need not be enclosed in quotation marks. In his typewritten manuscript a writer may indicate this difference in size of type by single-spacing ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... elegy; amoebaeum, ghazal^, palinode. dramatic poetry, lyric poetry; opera; posy, anthology; disjecta membra poetae song [Lat.], ballad, lay; love song, drinking song, war song, sea song; lullaby; music &c 415; nursery rhymes. [Bad poetry] doggerel, Hudibrastic verse^, prose run mad; macaronics^; macaronic verse^, leonine verse; runes. canto, stanza, distich, verse, line, couplet, triplet, quatrain; strophe, antistrophe^. verse, rhyme, assonance, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... apparently in abbreviations (sin ortografia), that Las Casas says he found extreme difficulty in making it out. Now let us observe that date, which is given in fantastic style, apparently because the inscription is in a rude doggerel, and the writer seems to have wished to keep his "verses" tolerably even. (They don't scan much better than Walt Whitman's.) As it stands, the date reads anno domini millesimo quatercentessimo octiesque uno atque insuper anno octavo, i. e. "in the ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... In The Everlasting Mercy, written in octosyllabics, the metre of Christmas Eve, he is unflinchingly realistic, as Browning was in describing the chapel. The Athenaeum thought Browning ought not to write about the mysteries of the Christian faith in doggerel. But Christmas Eve is not doggerel. It is simply the application of the rules of realism to a discussion of religion. It may lack the dignity of the Essay on Man, but it is more interesting because it is more definite, ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... going to do away with those atrocious doggerel rhymes in the street cars and substitute real poetry. It will cost a great deal to get it written, but we have funds, and the public taste must be elevated." The work of such clubs as this, and constant endeavors towards educational ...
— Patty Fairfield • Carolyn Wells
... sacred carols by country people continued, indeed, but the creative artistic impulse was lost. True carols after the Reformation tend to be doggerel, and no doubt many of the traditional pieces printed in such collections as Bramley and Stainer's[33]{37} are debased survivals from the Middle Ages, or perhaps new words written for old tunes. Such carols as "God rest you merry, gentlemen," have unspeakably delightful airs, ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... these 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 humour of the spectacle, however, ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... From the Chronicles of Ricobaldo and Francis Pipin, Muratori (dissert. xxvi. tom. ii. p. 492) has translated this curious fact with the doggerel verses that accompanied the gift:— Ave decus orbis, ave! victus tibi destinor, ave! Currus ab Augusto Frederico Caesare justo. Vae Mediolanum! jam sentis spernere vanum Imperii vires, proprias tibi tollere vires. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... wishes with regard to 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
... endangered by the new incoming administration." The Union generals, except Fremont and Phelps and a few subordinates, accepted this as public opinion, and as their guide in dealing with the slavery question. That opinion is better expressed in the doggerel, sung in after months by the negro troops as they marched along ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... 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
... 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
... not have been expected. But to destroy one's ear for whole years with thy poetry, to see thy belly of a Domitius on slim legs whirled about in Pyrrhic dance; to hear thy music, thy declamation, thy doggerel verses, wretched poet of the suburbs,—is a thing surpassing my power, and it has roused in me the wish to die. Rome stuffs its ears when it hears thee; the world reviles thee. I can blush for thee no longer, and I have no wish to do so. The howls of Cerberus, though resembling thy music, ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... 1200). This is the most important of the English riming chronicles, that is, history related in the form of doggerel verse, probably because poetry is more easily memorized than prose. We give here a free rendering of selected lines at the beginning of the poem, which tell us all we know of Layamon, the first who ever wrote as an Englishman for Englishmen, including ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... with an inclination to rhyme had composed some doggerel verse, which about twenty lads were singing to some sort of ...
— Frank Merriwell's Races • Burt L. Standish
... he took in 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 it to keep ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... doggerel, 'A Noble Personality,' is the most utter trash possible, and it couldn't have ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... could he not chant the piratical doggerel that Coke abhorred? That, at least, would have been more appropriate to present surroundings? But would it? Ah, Philip felt a twinge then. "Touche!" chortled some unseen imp who plied a venomous rapier. ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... but about this time he appears to have struck upon the vein which he was to work with such vigour and popularity. He turned his attention to abuses in Church and State, which he lashed with caustic satire, conveyed in short doggerel rhyming lines peculiar to himself, in which jokes, slang, invectives, and Latin quotations rush out pell-mell. His best works in this line are Why come ye not to Court? and Colin Clout, both directed against the clergy, and the former against Wolsey in particular. ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... 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
... the best ever!" Tom declared, and they started with much enthusiasm, taking with them "Songbird" Powell, a school chum addicted to the making of doggerel which he called poetry, Fred Garrison, a plucky boy who had stood by them through thick and thin, and Hans Mueller, a German youth who was still struggling with the mysteries of the English tongue. With the boys went an old friend, Mrs. Stanhope, and her sister, Mrs. Laning. With Mrs. Stanhope ...
— The Rover Boys on the Farm - or Last Days at Putnam Hall • Arthur M. Winfield (AKA Edward Stratemeyer)
... be," said Sinclair; "and now that we know that, we're going to find it. Of course, we assumed there was one, but we had only that foolish doggerel to prove it. Now this regular bill establishes it as a fact beyond all doubt. Do you know ...
— Patty's Friends • Carolyn Wells
... as he remembered to have heard afterwards. He made a long face, but, in truth, felt scarcely more sorrowful than a mute at a funeral. These first passions of men and women are mostly abortive; and are dead almost before they are born. Esmond could repeat, to his last day, some of the doggerel lines in which his muse bewailed his pretty lass; not without shame to remember how bad the verses were, and how good he thought them; how false the grief, and yet how he was rather proud of it. 'Tis an error, surely, ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... 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 understand his ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... 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 descendants may have in determining ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... great souls of earlier ages will be found to have 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, ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... battalion, for some grave breach of discipline, he would stride up and down the line with the tread of an elephant, and expound the Articles of War in stentorian tones that equaled the roar of a bull! But if, perchance, in the awesome precincts of his office, he afterwards got hold of a piece of doggerel some witty midshipman had written descriptive of such a scene, none would ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 1, Issue 4 - April, 1884 • Various
... versions of the Psalms often inclined to doggerel, and though they probably had little, if any, influence on the Authorized Version, they made their own claims to accuracy, and even after the appearance of the King James Bible sometimes demanded attention as improved renderings. George Wither, ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... sugar. This incident led to several pamphlets. In The Presbyterian, Lash or Noctroff's Maid Whipt (1661), a satire on Crofton, we read: "It is not only contrary to Gospel but good manners to take up a wench's petticoats, smock and all"; and in the doggerel ballad of "Bo-Peep," which was also written on the same subject, it is said that Crofton should have left his wife to chastise the maid. Crofton published two pamphlets, one under his own name and one under that ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... One day, after a repetition of her original contumely, he appeared before his nurse in a violent rage, and complained vehemently of the old lady, declaring that he could not bear the sight of her, and then he broke out into the following doggerel, which he repeated over and ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... 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
... instantly. Why did they hold him, and prevent his going?—he should lose the money—he must go. No! they would not let him. He hid his face in his burning hands, and feebly bemoaned his own weakness, and the cruelty of his persecutors. A short pause, and he shouted out a few doggerel rhymes—the last he had ever learned. He rose in bed, drew up his withered limbs, and rolled about in uncouth positions; he was acting—he was at the theatre. A minute's silence, and he murmured the burden ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... seen the stalking By a rabbit of a bear, Nor yet an oyster walking Sedately up the stair; But a marvel as amazing Inspires these doggerel rhymes, For I've read a leader praising The PREMIER ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 25th, 1920 • Various
... to moral men and women, who to their lasting advantage have emancipated themselves from ecclesiastical guidance. On the contrary, the public in America which looks for moral inspiration to clergymen, is fed upon this sort of doggerel:— ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... to you, Uncle Harry," said Budge. And there, before that audience, and HER, I was obliged to sing that dreadful doggerel, line for line, as Budge repeated it. My teeth were set tight, my brow grew clammy, and I gazed upon Toddie with terrible thoughts in my mind. No one laughed—I grew so desperate that a titter would have given relief. At last I heard ...
— Helen's Babies • John Habberton
... 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
... death and the descent of Orpheus, her husband, to hell for her recovery, with which Virgil closes the fourth Georgic, is among the most exquisite passages in all Latin poetry. Pope made it the subject of his Ode on St. Cecilia's Day; but if Pluto and Proserpine really relented at the doggerel that the English poet puts into the mouth of the half-divine minstrel, they cannot deserve the title of illacrymabiles which Horace gives them. Some of the pedantic scientists (to borrow a new word) have discovered in this tale of true love an allegory ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... 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 ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... A prominent character in Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais. Hertrippa is a magician who gives Panurge advice on the subject of marriage. Bluphocks is simply racking his brain for words to rhyme with "Pippa," so that he may write doggerel poetry to or about her. For "King Agrippa" ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... 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 the conversation of ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... performed in a foreign language, or, if in English, by those who have not the art of making their words intelligible, there will always be a demand for books that tell the story more clearly than is to be found in the doggerel translations of the libretti, unless audiences return with one accord to the attitude of the amateurs of former days, who paid not the slightest attention to the plot of the piece, provided only that their favourite ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... down as knavish blasphemers? Our reverence, after all, is given not to an Elizabethan named William Shakespeare, who was born at Stratford, and married, and migrated to London, and became a second-rate actor, and afterwards returned to Stratford, and made a will, and composed a few lines of doggerel for the tombstone under which he was buried. Our reverence is given to the writer of certain plays and sonnets. To that second-rate actor, because we believe he wrote those plays and sonnets, we give that reverence. But our belief is not such as we give to the proposition that one and ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... presented by the language, which has not nearly the same amount of vowel terminations, nor of simple uniform vowel sounds, as the Spanish; the double termination, however full of grace and beauty in the Castilian, assumes, perhaps from the effect of association, rather a doggerel air in ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... and in the civil professions. At these gatherings, Mingo, bustling around and serving his guests, would keep the table in a roar with his quaint sayings, and his local satires in the shape of impromptu doggerel; and he would also repeat snatches of orations which he had heard in Washington when Judge Wornum was a member of Congress. But his chief accomplishments lay in the wonderful ease and fluency with which he imitated the eloquent ...
— Mingo - And Other Sketches in Black and White • Joel Chandler Harris
... snowy hills and house-roofs rosy with the glow of sunset, it was warm and southern by contrast. The four principal towns of West and North Bothnia are thus characterised in an old verse of Swedish doggerel: Umea, the fine; Pitea, the needle-making; Lulea, the lazy; and in Tornea, ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... whose copies Sir Joshua said, "They make other people laugh, and me cry," became a great favorite with Dr. Johnson, who probably knew how to sympathize with the morbid sensitiveness of the poor lady. She seems never to have tired of pouring tea for him! He, in return, wrote doggerel verses to her over ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... arm through the commanding general's mismanagement of the army. One was marching with an air imitative of some sublime drum major. Upon his features was an unholy mixture of merriment and agony. As he marched he sang a bit of doggerel in a high and ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... 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 ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... books which formed through the entire colonial period the most popular domestic reading of the Puritan home. These were The Bay Psalm Book (1640), which was the first book published in America; Michael Wigglesworth's (1631-1705) Day of Doom (1662), a doggerel poem; and the New England Primer (c. 1690), called "the Little Bible." The sole voice heard in opposition was Thomas Morton's satirical New English Canaan (1637), whose author was sent out of the colony for the scandal of Merrymount, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... obnoxious '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 newspapers, and that journalism had already attained ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... scarlet ribbons through the village, singing a hymn in honour of St. Agatha. All the young unmarried women who chanced to meet the procession extended the first two fingers of the left hand pointing towards the rabbit, at the same time repeating the following doggerel:— ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... charcoal, drawn for illustration or refutation in the heat of some strenuous argument; caricatures in the same medium, some of them trenchantly like, of the customers as well as of certain artistic celebrities, whose laurels Brodonowski's had not approved, varied here and there by an epigram or a doggerel ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... of my acquaintance hereby identifies Alan's air. It has been printed (it seems) in Campbell's "Tales of the West Highlands," vol. ii., p. 91. Upon examination it would really seem as if Miss Grant's unrhymed doggerel (see Chapter v.) would fit, with a little humouring, to the notes in question.—R. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Something in 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 something to him, as head and leader of the community ...
— The Triple Alliance • Harold Avery
... taste in their interior economy to prove that a refined intellect had projected them; and had projected a Vandalism, only because fancy had been followed instead of judgment; with as much nonchalance as is evinced by a perfect poet, who is extemporizing doggerel for a baby; full of brilliant points, which he cannot help, and jumbled into confusion, for which he ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... 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 ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... believe in this doggerel—especially frightened were the Irish in London, and the lower classes generally. There was a great exodus of the former, some even listening to the entreaties of their friends, and returning to Ireland, and many of the latter moved eastward of the ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton |
