|
|
|
More "Doggerel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "Book of Martyrs." His knowledge of the Bible was such that he might have been called a living concordance; and on the margin of his copy of the "Book of Martyrs" are still legible the ill-spelled lines of doggerel in which he expressed his reverence for the brave sufferers, and his implacable enmity to the ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... 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 his goatee, ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... 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 ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... is, the personal equation is ever to be reckoned withal, and I have had my preferences, as those that went before me had theirs. I have omitted much, as Aytoun's 'Lays,' whose absence many will resent; I have included much, as that brilliant piece of doggerel of Frederick Marryat's, whose presence some will regard with distress. This without reference to enforcements due to the very nature ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... 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. ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... A.-S. delfan, delve, to dig. Each canto of the "Faerie Queene" is introduced by a four-line doggerel like this, containing the argument, or a brief summary of the narrative,—in imitation, ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... a long time. When modern creeds are gone, to what in literature will men turn for their inspiration? —To whatever in literature contains real inspiration, you may answer. They will not sing Dr. Watts's doggerel in their churches; but such things perhaps as Wordsworth's The World is too much with us, or Henley's I am the Captain of my Soul. And then, after a long time and many racial pralayas, you can imagine such poems ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... but, since the Flood, always tastes of 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
... paused here, 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 ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... religion is well illustrated by the three 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 ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... 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, is that the dramatis ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... 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 metrical part 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 them as ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... text as an excellent imitation of Choctaw—a language with which the colonel, as a whilom resident of the Indian Territories, was supposed to be familiar. Indeed, the next week's INTELLIGENCER contained some vile doggerel supposed to be an answer to Mrs. Tretherick's poem, ostensibly written by the wife of a Digger Indian chief, accompanied by a glowing eulogium ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... of the "epidemic of verse writing" that broke out among the members of the expedition. It was the custom to hang the verses up in the smoking room, and on that fact, even, Father later wrote some doggerel. It was while on this expedition that he wrote, "Golden Crowned Sparrow ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... added also by occasionally referring an impression to another sense. For instance, the newspaper poet writes: "The street was white with snow," and makes his line commonplace doggerel. Tennyson says: "The streets were dumb with snow," and his line ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... painter, courteous gentleman, profound student of Shakespeare! When the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy was raging in America (it really did rage there!) Jefferson wrote the most delicious doggerel about it. He ridiculed, and his ridicule killed the Bacon enthusiasts all the more dead because ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... 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, ...
— How to Write Letters (Formerly The Book of Letters) - A Complete Guide to Correct Business and Personal Correspondence • Mary Owens Crowther
... subjective element in the reckoning. The more important metrical tests include the following: the frequency of rhyme, whether in the heroic couplet or, as not uncommonly occurs in early plays, in alternates and even such elaborate arrangements as the sonnet; doggerel lines; alexandrines, or lines of twelve syllables; the presence of an extra syllable before a pause within the line; short lines, especially at the end of speeches; the substitution of other feet for the regular iambic movement of blank verse; weak and light endings; and, most valuable, the position ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... have laughed heartily at him anywhere else; but the whole scene was past a jest; and a gleam of pathos and tenderness seemed to shine even from that doggerel,—a vista, as it were, of true genial nature, in the far distance. But as he looked round again, 'What hope,' he thought, 'of its realisation? Arcadian dreams of pastoral innocence and graceful industry, I suppose, are to be henceforth monopolised by the stage or the boudoir? Never, ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... 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 ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... 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 ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... 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 ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... 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 one man against a dozen. ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... 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
... look down on such miserable translators, who make doggerel of his Latin, mistake his meaning, misapply his censures, and often contradict their own? He is fixed as a landmark to set ...
— All for Love • John Dryden
... had been committed during the night; the companies had scoured the streets singing some doggerel, which one of the bloody wretches, being in poetic vein, had composed, ...
— Massacres Of The South (1551-1815) - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... plainly assonates, rather than rimes, with "glorious," but this is dangerously close to doggerel. Assonance is unsuited to the genius of any language possessed of a rich vowel-system. This is evident to any one who has read Archbishop Trench's attempt to render Calderon's verse ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... 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 ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the want of appreciation of their fellows. Who admired 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 ignorance. ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... 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
... scene were dead. The story may not be 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 himself at liberty to reject if it does not ...
— Claverhouse • Mowbray Morris
... Thomas 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
... 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 were expressed ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... called in contradistinction to rhyming, was becoming fast the fashion among the more learned. Stonyhurst and others had tried their hands at hexameter translations from the Latin and Greek epics, which seem to have been doggerel enough; and ever and anon some youthful wit broke out in iambics, sapphics, elegiacs, and what not, to the great detriment of the queen's English and ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... Waits came to us on Christmas eve, and on the day itself, in the shape of little parties of boys or girls, singing wretched doggerel rhymes, and going away well pleased with the guerdon of a penny or two. Last evening came two or three older choristers at pretty near bedtime, and sang some carols at our door. They were psalm tunes, however. Everybody with whom we have had to ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 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 ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... a Jesuit, wrote Reflections on Inevitable Death, Common to All. His short doggerel rimes, which breathe a jovial gaiety, were long extremely popular. In recent times suspicion has been cast on Baka's authorship of ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... have been by the rough versification and somewhat clumsy sarcasm of the Devil's Thoughts. The poem created something like a furore, and sold a large reissue of the number of the Morning Post in which it appeared. Nevertheless it is from the metrical point of view doggerel, as indeed the author admits, three of its most smoothly- flowing stanzas being from the hand of Southey, while there is nothing in its boisterous political drollery to put its composition beyond the reach of any man of strong partisan feelings and a turn for street-humour. ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... 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 ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... from this correspondence. I have condensed the responses 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 the subject, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various
... 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 the burghers held the city stoutly, when the money-kings ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... Nay, if memory be not very treacherous, amidst that roar was loudly distinguishable the voice of him who on an after day, yet to be spoken of, cursed from God's altar those who wished to realise his simulated aspirations and in the endeavour had forfeited their lives. A doggerel ballad had been written for the occasion by Thomas Davis, to the air of the "Gallant Tipperary," over which himself and his friends afterwards indulged in many a hearty laugh. One ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... carried him in his arms, when he was a child, and still looked on him in the light of one, standing round his bed. His mother held a basin, and Hans a book, and the priest a censer, which he was swinging to and fro, and muttering words, in very doggerel Latin, while ever and anon, he sprinkled him with water from the basin. What Laneta was about, he could not exactly make out, but he thought that she had a box in her hands, which she held open. Had he not been very sleepy and tired he would have jumped up and ascertained whether ...
— Count Ulrich of Lindburg - A Tale of the Reformation in Germany • W.H.G. Kingston
... an itinerant doctor, for there was no town in 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; but ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... the township vortex where all assemble to "swap stories" and deal out the news. Lincoln, from behind the counter—his pulpit—not merely repeated items of information which he had heard, but also recited doggerel satire of his own concoction, punning and emitting sparks of wit. Lincoln was hailed as the "capper" of any "good things ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... 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 indicate the quality of their author's ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... of the "Harrowing of Hell," mysteries that thrilled the people long ago, is given in the original spelling, as some test of the change effected in the others. Further, in the Appendix will be found a late example of a St. George and the Dragon doggerel Christmas play, which comes from Cornwall, and which in a slightly varying form has been played in many shires, from Wessex to Tyneside, within living memory. This shows us the last state of the traditional mystery, and the English folk-play as it became when ...
— Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction • Anonymous
... 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 singers were taking part. Very often in that classic period the performers ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... Compagnie!'" said Telford, seating himself at the piano, and playing the first bars of that well-known air, to which, in our meetings, we were accustomed to improvise a doggerel in turn. ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... of doggerel had been inscribed on a card sent him by Harriette in the third-grade valentine box, but Louise need never know the secret of its authorship. And it expressed his feelings with such a ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... McLean laid the foundations of The Adelie Blizzard which recorded our life for the next seven months. It was a monthly publication, and contributions were invited from all on every subject but the wind. Anything from light doggerel to heavy blank verse was welcomed, and original articles, letters to the Editor, plays, reviews on books and serial stories were accepted within the limits of our supply of foolscap paper ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... "I could not venture on a stanza before you. You cannot imagine what doggerel I make to ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... 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
... man, that serves only as it undergoes metabolism, and becomes thought and lives, and in its very living passes away. You scientific people, with your fancy of a terrible exactitude in language, of indestructible foundations built, as that Wordsworthian doggerel on the title-page of Nature says, "for aye," are ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... her books was republished in London, with the title: "The Tenth Muse, lately sprung up in America." John Norton once said that if Virgil could only have heard the seraphic poems of Anne Bradstreet, he would have thrown his heathen doggerel into the fire. She was sister of Joseph Dudley, and evidently inherited this rhyming talent, such as it was, from her father. Governor Bradstreet belonged to the moderate party who would have been glad to extend the ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... memorial of some dead and gone farmer or labourer who lived and died in the village hard by, is still more intimate and suggestive. The rustic, childish sculpture of the village mason and the artless doggerel of the village schoolmaster, bring back the time and place and the conditions of life much more vividly than the more scholarly inscriptions and the more artistic enrichments of monuments of greater pretensions. But where are your ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... 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, ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... mother's knee; look at the psalms and hymns you remember hearing sung at church when you were a child: you know how impossible it is for you to estimate these upon their literary merits. They may be almost doggerel; but not Mr. Tennyson can touch you like them! The most effective eloquence is that which is mainly done by the mind to which it is addressed: it is that which touches chords which of themselves yield matchless music; it is that which wakens up ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... the very predominant hexameter: if we transpose the words—his clever imitator says—no man would observe that he had anything else before him than simple prose; in point of effect they can only be compared to our doggerel verses.(24) The poems of Terence and those of Lucilius stand on the same level of culture, and have the same relation to each other as a carefully prepared and polished literary work has to a letter written on the spur of the moment. But the incomparably ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... wife, Benjamin's mother, was the daughter of Peter Folger, one of the settlers of Nantucket,—"a godly and learned Englishman," who, like many of the pious New England folk, used to relieve his heart in doggerel rhymes. In his "Looking-Glass for the Times" he appeals boldly for liberty of conscience in behalf of the persecuted Anabaptists and Quakers, and we are not surprised that Franklin should have commended ...
— Benjamin Franklin • Paul Elmer More
... 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 better ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... laughed. "You've got it wrong, Uncle Jabez," she declared. "There is another version of that old doggerel. It is: ...
— Ruth Fielding in Moving Pictures - Or Helping The Dormitory Fund • Alice Emerson
... 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 ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... his friends and patrons many who afterward became distinguished both in war 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
... as possible then they disown their connection with the Gandas, one of the most despised castes, and say that they are a separate caste consisting of the disciples of Kabir. This has given rise to the following doggerel ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... tricks are identical with those still delighting holiday audiences; but the allusions to political events and current topics, so dear to modern purveyors of burlesque and pantomime, have no place in the entertainment. The doggerel and songs of the opening are without puns or pretensions of a comic kind, and must certainly be ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... out this doggerel in a rough, loud contralto, when her chamberlain appeared at the door, and announced that his royal highness was waiting for her ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... mentioned belonging to the Second Part) is to enable the pupil to read 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 of the ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... aisle, formerly stood the tomb of A. Gorges, son of Sir A. Gorges, who was possessor of the chapel for many years. This blocked up the aisle and was taken to pieces. The black slab which was on the top is set in the floor, and the brasses containing an epitaph in doggerel rhyme, attributing all the merits in the universe to the deceased, hang on the wall on the north side. The date of the chapel, 1528, is on the capital of one of the pillars supporting the arch which divides the chapel ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... did his "sums" in the sand on the ground, or on a wooden shovel which, after it was covered on both sides, he scraped down so as to erase the work. A note-book is preserved, containing, along with examples in arithmetic, this boyish doggerel: ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... that to-morrow ever be?"—the refrain of the doggerel rung in her ears. "Am I never to be free from this brother and sister?" she cried to herself, desperately, as she advanced to the house. "Am I never to be free from ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... as well speak here of his two collections of "Poems" (1867 and 1889) (the latter being an expurgated but enlarged edition of the earlier), to which the present criticisms particularly apply. Both editions contain notable things amid occasional bits of what scarcely rises above doggerel. The sailor songs, though rough, are true in tone and have a catching nautical swing; but of far deeper ring and more intensely felt are the poems which deal with the nocturnal sides of nature. These have at times a strange, shivering resonance, ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... of many fans, the frou-frou of silk dresses, and above all the din and sound of dance music, he heard an inane laugh and an affected voice repeating the doggerel rhyme that was even now written on that dirty piece of paper which ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... round inside her head, as the mosquitoes buzzed outside.—And meanwhile the familiar, foolish noises of the garden at evening knocked at her ear. On the other side of the hedge a batch of third-form girls were whispering, with choked laughter, a doggerel rhyme which was hard to say, and which meant something quite different did the tongue trip over a certain letter. Of two girls who were playing tennis in half-hearted fashion, the one next Laura said 'Oh, damn!' every time she missed a ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... 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 ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... just as that of the dance is shown in the finales. Haydn's adagios, at his best, speak with the deepest yet the simplest feeling. A fairly close analogy is that of Burns, who, with little natural inspiration, found inspiration in his native ballads, and often worked up the merest doggerel into artistic shapes of wondrous poignancy. Haydn's habitual temper was cheerful, and his music rattles along with a certain gaiety of gallop very far away from the mechanical grinding or pounding accents ...
— Haydn • John F. Runciman
... editorial writer in our day) the world was greatly amused at an 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 ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... claes, clothes. clarty, dirty. cloot, mend, patch. clour, dint caused by a blow. cockernony, woman's hair twisted up. cod, pillow. coorse, coarse. crack, talk. craigie, throat. crambo-clink, rhyme, doggerel. crap, crop. cratur, creature. creishy, fat. crockaneetion, smithereens, bits. croochin', crouching. cry, bear (a child). cryin', accouchement. ...
— The Auld Doctor and other Poems and Songs in Scots • David Rorie
... to 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 church of St. Dunstan's, Stepney, which they considered ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... 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 the cabins of the Flintshire ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... 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. ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... 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
... hesitations, 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 into a roar ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... had superintended them, and sufficient 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 does ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... Nevada made a single speech that filled a hundred dreary pages of the Congressional Record. Senator Allen of Nebraska quoted more than thirty authorities, ranging from the Pandects of Justinian to enlivening doggerel poetry. Feeling ran high. In the West, Jones, Allen and others were looked upon as heroes; in the East, as villains. To a satirical onlooker it seemed that the nation had become insanely obsessed with the question ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... hands, and said she was very magnanimous; but he still felt hollow. The only further remark that his seething brain presented was a scrap of ancient doggerel: ...
— Geoffrey Strong • Laura E. Richards
... that a man who 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 of Carlyle's French Revolution if it were possible to buy ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... me of some poetry, or rather doggerel," said Mr. Harry, "that I cut out of a newspaper for you yesterday;" and he drew from his pocket a little slip of ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... Republican," and of Lewis and Clarke's "Tour," and author of "Noah"; Dr. Readel, "a fellow of infinite jest"; Brackenridge, author of "Views in Louisiana," and "History of the War"; Dennison, an Englishman, who wrote clever doggerel; and, at different times, two or three more, not worth mentioning, even if I remembered their names—we passed every Saturday evening, after the club was established, until it was broken up by President Watkins's going to Washington, Vice-President Pierpont to the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... two hundred days of indulgence to all those who devoutly repeat the above ejaculation, and invoke the sweet names of Mary, Jess, and Josph."... The people here have certainly a poetical vein in their composition. Everything is put into verse—sometimes doggerel, like the above (in which luz rhyming with Jess, shows that the z is pronounced here like an s), occasionally a little better, but ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... (This doggerel came in answer to a question whether the Spirits could write poetry, and is in a hand not dissimilar to the preceding ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission
... contents. If the occupation was distasteful to him, the more wholesome to pursue it! So, supplying the deficiencies of torn or defaced pages by reference to another of the copies, he arrived by degrees at a clear understanding of the whole matter. The story was set forth in rhyming doggerel. The poet was not blessed with a gift of melody or of style. Absence of scansion tortured the ear. Coarseness of diction offended the taste. And yet, as he read on, Julius reluctantly admitted that ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... of the young, is the only sure and safe way of building up the Church. He also quotes Dr. Morris as saying: "The mourners' bench was introduced into Lutheran churches in imitation of the Methodists, and disorders, such as shouting, clapping of hands, groaning, and singing of choruses of doggerel verses to the most frivolous tunes, whilst ministers or members, and sometimes women, were engaged in speaking to the mourners. Feelings were aroused, as usual, by portraying the horrors of hell, reciting affecting stories, alluding to deaths in families, violent vociferation, and other means. ...
— The Way of Salvation in the Lutheran Church • G. H. Gerberding
... these songs are not, however, confined to a judicious selection of words to suit the air. There is often a quaint local humour conveyed in the doggerel verses; the charm being greatly enhanced by the introduction of creole slang and mispronounced Spanish. Fragments of these effusions occasionally degenerate into street sayings, which are in everybody's mouth till the next ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... 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), we do not know a single printed ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... Crassus' 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
... expressed the manhood of England; but many of the Puritan practices were open to ridicule, and the Royalists, in revenge for their defeat, began to use ridicule without mercy. During the early years of the Restoration doggerel verses ridiculing Puritanism, and burlesque,—that is, a ridiculous representation of serious subjects, or a serious representation of ridiculous subjects,—were the most popular form of literature with London ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... frantic with alarm—the boy had disgraced him, and even his own position seemed to be threatened when some wit adroitly accused the parent of writing the doggerel for ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... miser in a fixed proportion of men; so, are there, I believe, quite as small a representative set of absolutely heartless persons. I am certain that the "good Samaritans" outvie the "Levites" in our daily existence—opposed, though my theory may be, to the ruling of the old doggerel, which ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... 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 of Alethes Noctroff (1657), in which ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... 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 ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... 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 something ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... is located in an old monastery, where a part of the cloisters remain, with the dormitory above; in it is an oriel window where Queen Elizabeth on visiting the town is reputed to have stood and answered a reception address in rhyme from the "Men of Coventrie" with some doggerel of equal merit, and concluding with the words, "Good Lord, what fools ye be!" The good Queen Bess, we are told, liked to visit Coventry to see bull-baiting. As we have said, Coventry formerly had a cathedral and a castle, but both have been swept away; it ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... liberal home teaching to the regulation gerund- grinding and Procrustean discipline of school. "The dismal change is ordained, and then—thin meagre Latin with small shreds and patches of Greek, is thrown like a pauper's pall over all your early lore; instead of sweet knowledge, vile, monkish, doggerel grammars and graduses, dictionaries and lexicons, and horrible odds and ends of dead languages are given you for your portion, and down you fall, from Roman story to a three-inch scrap of 'Scriptores Romani,'—from Greek ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... 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 ...
— The Printer Boy. - Or How Benjamin Franklin Made His Mark. An Example for Youth. • William M. Thayer
... 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 music in ...
— Edward MacDowell • John F. Porte
... anxiously looking forward to a period of universal emancipation. A gentleman, by name Benjamin Lundy, published at that time an anti-slavery paper in Greenville, East Tennessee; which paper had an extensive circulation. About that time, I gathered up my anti-slavery juvenile doggerel, corrected it, as well as I could,—selected poems from Cowper and others, on the subject; forwarded the manuscript to the aforesaid B. Lundy, and the result was, a little volume of anti-slavery poems. But the abolition excitement broke out in the North, and the South took the alarm. The mouths ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... 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
... published in 1805. As we look over the "Echo," and find nothing in it but doggerel,—generally very dull doggerel,—we might wonder at the applause it obtained, if we did not recollect how fiercely the two great parties engaged each other. In a riot, any stick, stone, or ignoble fragment of household pottery is valuable as a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... 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
... 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 a ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... 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
... convince it by marrying this fair 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 ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... photographs and their invitations, their old notes and bits of doggerel sent to accompany small courtesies—flowers, music, a Havana dog, or the loan of a horse. It was all vivid and real enough now. Those men were not to me mere historical figures of whom one reads. They fought historic battles, they ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... hours long; public prayer half an hour. Worse still was what went by the name of music—doggerel hymns full of the most sulphurous theology, uttered congregationally as "lined off" by the leader—nasal, dissonant, and discordant in the highest imaginable degree. The church itself was but a barn, homely-shaped, bare, and in winter cold as out-of-doors. At this season ...
— History of the United States, Vol. I (of VI) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... floods of argument and 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, Gyn-y-Coed, Llanrychwyn, ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... 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 of some roaring ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... little doggerel lay;—One truth I tell, in sorrow tell it: I'm forced to give my verse away, Because, ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... in quaint old German and is interspersed with many pious comments, biblical quotations and Latin words and phrases, and now and then it breaks out into doggerel verse. The editor (Spiess by name) tells us that he publishes the book 'as a warning to all Christians and sensible people to avoid the terrible example of Doctor Faustus.' He evidently takes the thing very seriously and has purposely (as he says) omitted ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... doggerel rhymes by children in playing their out-of-door games, to decide by the last word which of their number shall be "it" or "takkie," in games like "Hide and Seek" and "I Spy," must be familiar to every reader who has had any youth ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... 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
... letters is miserably harassing." Because of the too brilliant light elsewhere in Vailima, he was painted in a room which was close, and the air fatigued him. While sitting, he wiled away an hour by making doggerel lines all to rhyme with the artist's name, Nerli. The portrait was bought by a Scotch-woman travelling in New Zeal and, where, after the author's death, it had remained unsold. His mother, on returning to Scotland ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • E. Blantyre Simpson
... and Hare, but though greedy for more victims, received with shouts the solitary wretch who found his way to the gallows out of five or six who seem not less guilty than he. But the story begins to be stale, although I believe a doggerel ballad upon it would be popular, how brutal soever the wit. This is the progress of human passions. We ejaculate, exclaim, hold up to Heaven our hand, like the rustic Phidyle[246]—next morning the mood changes, and we dance a jig to the tune which moved us to tears. Mr. Bell sends me a specimen ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... 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 be ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... 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 express ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... of 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
... her head approvingly 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
... Imperialists, in overwhelming force, thought to crush him at Rosbach. He put them to shameful rout; and then, instead of bonfires and Te Deums, mocked at them in doggerel rhymes of amazing indecency. While he was beating the French, the Austrians took Silesia from him. He marched to recover it, found them strongly posted at Leuthen, eighty thousand men against thirty thousand, and without hesitation ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... with some of the doggerel verse offered to small children, one is struck with the literary superiority in the choice of words. Here, in spite of the simplicity of the poem, there is not the ordinary limited vocabulary, nor the forced rhyme, nor the application of a ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... 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 would our Puritan great-grandsires have said to that? They never ...
— Old News - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 2. The English doggerel expresses the opposite sentiment, 'My son's my son till he gets him a wife; My daughter's my daughter ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... 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
... 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
... affluence for ten months; and I smiled at the fashionable sunlight in the Park, the dusty cavalcades; and I loved to shock my friends by bowing to those whom I should not bow to; above all, the life of the theatres, that life of raw gaslight, whitewashed walls, of light, doggerel verse, slangy polkas and waltzes, interested me beyond legitimate measure, so curious and unreal did it seem. I lived at home, but dined daily at a fashionable restaurant; at half-past eight I was at the theatre. Nodding familiarly ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... 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 ...
— The Triple Alliance • Harold Avery
... choice 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 ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... 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
... days later he writes to his cousin with all the old hilarity, his letter being mostly in doggerel rhyme beginning: ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... mysticism which has 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, as has been said, kept continual friction between ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... It is doggerel, of course, but it has a certain cleverness as a satire on the music-hall song of the day, and the Gordons carried it gaily with them to their battlefields, blending it in that odd mixture of humor and tragedy that makes up the soldier's life. The bravest, it is truly said, ...
— Tommy Atkins at War - As Told in His Own Letters • James Alexander Kilpatrick
... ages. Descending from the gravity of religious disquisition and the dignity of history and science, the authors of later times have been content to limit their efforts to works of fiction and amusement, and to ballads and doggerel descriptions ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... fall into couplets. But, other things being equal, a large amount of rime is always a sign of early work. This is especially true when the rimes occur, not in pairs, but in quatrains or sonnet forms, or (as they sometimes do in the first comedies) in scraps of sing-song doggerel. ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... old doggerel songs are taken from an admirable selection of sailor songs published by John Ashton. The names of the writers are not given, but their strong nautical flavour and queer composition indicate their origin. No landsman can ever imitate the sailor when the power of song or composition is on ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... 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 me, and ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... English refugees compiled their 'Sternhold and 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, ...
— A Practical Discourse on Some Principles of Hymn-Singing • Robert Bridges
... 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 hear of them instructing their ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... neighbours, they set up on his land a Straw-bull, as it is called. This is a gigantic figure of a bull made of stubble on a framework of wood and adorned with flowers and leaves. Attached to it is a label on which are scrawled doggerel verses in ridicule of the man on whose land ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... the moral support, the cool-headed adviser, surrounded by a crowd of brainless, empty-headed young fops, who were even now repeating from mouth to mouth, and with every sign of the keenest enjoyment, a doggerel quatrain which he had just given forth. Everywhere the absurd, silly words met her: people seemed to have little else to speak about, even the Prince had asked her, with a little laugh, whether she appreciated her ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... was 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 ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... One of his modern Polish biographers often heard in his youth a song purporting to be Kosciuszko's composition, with the tradition that he had composed it to his guitar—he played both the guitar and the violin—on the arrival of Polish visitors.[1] The doggerel, kindly little verses, express the hope that everything his compatriots see in his modest house will be as agreeable to them as their company is to their host, and inform them that he raised its walls with the purpose of welcoming them therein. It is a fact that, true to the Pole's passion for the ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... ghazal[obs3], 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[obs3], prose run mad; macaronics[obs3]; macaronic verse[obs3], leonine verse; runes. canto, stanza, distich, verse, line, couplet, triplet, quatrain; strophe, antistrophe[obs3]. verse, rhyme, assonance, crambo[obs3], meter, measure, foot, numbers, strain, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... pages of the doggerel," said Sam, glancing over the sheets. "Here, you can read over my shoulders," and this was done, amid much merriment. Songbird had but little news and promised to be at college when ...
— The Rover Boys in the Air - From College Campus to the Clouds • Edward Stratemeyer
... 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 ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... believe they recognize the Countess de Vassart are doubtless in error. Mornac, long dead, is safe in his disguise; Tric-Trac was executed on the Place de la Roquette, and celebrated in doggerel by an unspeakable ballad writer. There remains Scarlett; dead or alive, I wish ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... 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 know again anywhere, leapt a yard out of the water, and I took it, in my absurd, sun-soaked ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... 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 indicate the quality of their author's personality. ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... against enclosure and depopulation were beginning to be passed, and Rous 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 ...
— The Enclosures in England - An Economic Reconstruction • Harriett Bradley
... very 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. ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... 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 ablest poems ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... 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 ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... the theological distinctions drawn by Luther and Knox between the democracy of sin under the first Adam and the democracy of grace under the second Adam or Christ. The levelling effect of these ideas, however, was unmistakably felt as in the doggerel of John Ball, the mad Wycliffite ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... 'Viva la Compagnie!'" said Telford, seating himself at the piano, and playing the first bars of that well-known air, to which, in our meetings, we were accustomed to improvise a doggerel in turn. ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... 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 ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... 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 ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... that doggerel, 'A Noble Personality,' is the most utter trash possible, and it couldn't have been ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... 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 ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... 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
... irate Ransom, "that if John Doe and Richard Roe, with a declaration in ejectment, could only be turned into doggerel, he would be an eminent ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... subjoin to this last kind of Wit the double Rhymes, which are used in Doggerel Poetry, and generally applauded by ignorant Readers. If the Thought of the Couplet in such Compositions is good, the Rhyme adds [little [12]] to it; and if bad, it will not be in the Power of the Rhyme ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... suffice 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 ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... preference to one, and, finally, the queen's father confessor, Bishop Boyl, devised the following plan. Twelve tapers, each consecrated to an Apostle, were to be lighted, and the child was to be named in honor of the candle which burned the longest. Southey, in somewhat prolix and doggerel verse, has given the following ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... the Church. He also quotes Dr. Morris as saying: "The mourners' bench was introduced into Lutheran churches in imitation of the Methodists, and disorders, such as shouting, clapping of hands, groaning, and singing of choruses of doggerel verses to the most frivolous tunes, whilst ministers or members, and sometimes women, were engaged in speaking to the mourners. Feelings were aroused, as usual, by portraying the horrors of hell, reciting affecting stories, alluding to deaths in families, violent vociferation, and ...
— The Way of Salvation in the Lutheran Church • G. H. Gerberding
... to himself, deeply shamed. "Moonlight, poetry, mit-holding, and all the rest of it. Never having had it before, it's going hard with me. Why in the devil wasn't I taught to write doggerel when I was in college? A fellow don't stand any show nowadays unless he's a ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... she might catch him if he left it on 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 ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... 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, rather a dull creature—at ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... bounds. Her studio was simply besieged by "the Quality." The Duchess of Orleans had to wait her turn a whole year before she could be painted. Vigee Le Brun's praise was in every mouth. She was sung in prose and verse; the poetasters ran to much doggerel of handsome intent, as was the fashion of the day. Marquises and the rest of the scribbling folk tripped over halting feet to sing her charms and immortalise her art. "L'orgueil de France" rhymed it to "la double puissance;" and "immortal crayon" to "admiration." ...
— Vigee Le Brun • Haldane MacFall
... 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. Ergo triumphorum urbs potes memor esse priorum ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... 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 ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... got it wrong, Uncle Jabez," she declared. "There is another version of that old doggerel. ...
— Ruth Fielding in Moving Pictures - Or Helping The Dormitory Fund • Alice Emerson
... some volumes of poetry, which fired his emulation, and he began to compose little pieces in verse. Two of these were printed by his brother and sold as street-ballads, but they were, as he informs us, wretched doggerel, and the ridicule thrown on them by his father deterred him from similar attempts. But though he laid aside poetry, he did not abandon his ambition to become a good English writer; he studied the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... and was looking through some printed slips in his pocketbook. "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 that last one, particularly, hearing his rendition of it. So we ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... old German and is interspersed with many pious comments, biblical quotations and Latin words and phrases, and now and then it breaks out into doggerel verse. The editor (Spiess by name) tells us that he publishes the book 'as a warning to all Christians and sensible people to avoid the terrible example of Doctor Faustus.' He evidently takes the thing very ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... formerly stood the tomb of A. Gorges, son of Sir A. Gorges, who was possessor of the chapel for many years. This blocked up the aisle and was taken to pieces. The black slab which was on the top is set in the floor, and the brasses containing an epitaph in doggerel rhyme, attributing all the merits in the universe to the deceased, hang on the wall on the north side. The date of the chapel, 1528, is on the capital of one of the pillars supporting the arch which divides the chapel from ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... other larger, more absorbing things on which the mind dwelt. There was the grey cold sea outside Dover and Portsmouth and Cork, where the great grey ships of war rocked and swung with the tides, where the sailors sang, in doggerel English, that bitter- sounding adaptation, "Germania rules t'e waves," where the flag of a World-Power floated for the world to see. And in oven-like cities of India there were men who looked out at the white sun-glare, the heat-baked dust, the welter of crowded streets, ...
— When William Came • Saki
... 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 ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... thee other deeds could 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 ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... Dell. From A.-S. delfan, delve, to dig. Each canto of the "Faerie Queene" is introduced by a four-line doggerel like this, containing the argument, or a brief summary of the narrative,—in imitation, probably, ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... winter sleeping on the snow, her breath rising in a brilliant cloud like the steam from a boiling cauldron. In this guise she earned her livelihood by singing in the streets, keeping time with a wand three feet long. Though taken for a lunatic, the doggerel verse she sang disproved the popular slanders. It denounced this fleeting life and its delusive pleasures. When given money, she either strung it on a cord and waved it to the time of her song or scattered it on the ground for the ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... imitators, as far as their 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
... 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, to talk of the simplicity of youth. ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... used to draw pictures for her edification, sometimes teasing her by making her own portrait, to which he gave exaggerated ears to indicate her curiosity. Then he wrote short satirical skits, such as the following, which in English doggerel quite ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... of the superlative termination est, as high'st for highest, bigg'st for biggest, though sometimes used by the poets, are always inelegant, and may justly be considered grammatically improper. They occur most frequently in doggerel verse, like that of Hudibras; the author of which work, wrote, in his droll fashion, not only the foregoing monosyllables, but learned'st for most learned, activ'st for most active, desperat'st for most desperate, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... that invincible activity 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 ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... only 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 ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... they were to marry. The mistress was let into 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
... 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
... 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 their thoughts; what they desired was to sing something that would strike home, so the ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... 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
... 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
... so many exceptions, which had all to be learned by themselves. And 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 ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... not, and of 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 tea-tray ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... were found to 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, ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... painfully haggard, reminding us of his own words, "the practice of letters is miserably harassing." Because of the too brilliant light elsewhere in Vailima, he was painted in a room which was close, and the air fatigued him. While sitting, he wiled away an hour by making doggerel lines all to rhyme with the artist's name, Nerli. The portrait was bought by a Scotch-woman travelling in New Zeal and, where, after the author's death, it had remained unsold. His mother, on returning ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • E. Blantyre Simpson
... 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 ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... 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 ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... guess what you want to ask me," he exclaimed, sternly and loudly; "you want to ask me how I can be mad enough to believe in a doggerel prophecy uttered in an age of superstition to awe the most ignorant hearers. I answer" (at those words his voice sank suddenly to a whisper), "I answer, because Stephen Monkton himself stands there at this moment confirming ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... always a sign of early work. This is especially true when the rimes occur, not in pairs, but in quatrains or sonnet forms, or (as they sometimes do in the first comedies) in scraps of sing-song doggerel. ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... commemoration in verse, I compose. There is generally something. I cannot say to which paper I send most of my poems, as I send to all. One of the weaknesses of the St. John's Gazette is its poetry. It is not worthy of the name. It is doggerel. I have sought to improve it, but the editor rejected my contributions. I continued to send them, hoping that they would educate his taste. One night I had sent him a very long poem which did not ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... led by a private grudge against Ferrier to take the step he had taken. It was also affirmed that he was acting at the instigation of the Free Church, who wanted to abolish their chair of Logic in the New College, but could not well do so so long as they had its present incumbent on their hands. A doggerel parody on John Gilpin, entitled "The Diverting History of John Cairns," in which a highly coloured account is given of the supposed genesis of the pamphlet, was written and found wide circulation. The first two stanzas of ...
— Principal Cairns • John Cairns
... 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 ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... 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 ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... 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 to be ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... of some poetry, or rather doggerel," said Mr. Harry, "that I cut out of a newspaper for you yesterday;" and he drew from his pocket a little slip ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... la Russie!" It was neatly phrased As MOHRENHEIM admitted, A President, in doggerel stanzas praised, Must be so ready-witted, Yet mild Republican and Autocrat, Hugging in friendly seeming, Suggest that Someone may be cuddled flat— At ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 17, 1892 • Various
... 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 that a mathematician may have architectonic power ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... 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 into a ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... 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
... 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 of some roaring song. He ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... were sufficient if the task was completed on time, but the time was up and no line was written. This meant being kept after school to write twelve lines. In this extremity. Jay Gould came to his rescue with the following doggerel:— ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... Marcia, indignantly. "Just listen! She's repeating the Desire as if it were a bit of doggerel." ...
— A Campfire Girl's Happiness • Jane L. Stewart
... 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 one, ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... inclination to rhyme had composed some doggerel verse, which about twenty lads were singing to some sort ...
— Frank Merriwell's Races • Burt L. Standish
... one got up and recited some doggerel by a London journalist which was said to be very popular in various parts of the country, but which did not appeal to ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... verse, distich, lyric, elegy, eclogue, idyl, madrigal, epic, ode, georgic, cid, rondeau, epilogue, epigram, elegiac, roundelay, dithyramb, dithyrambic, doggerel, rhapsody. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... 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 of popular ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... head, as the mosquitoes buzzed outside.—And meanwhile the familiar, foolish noises of the garden at evening knocked at her ear. On the other side of the hedge a batch of third-form girls were whispering, with choked laughter, a doggerel rhyme which was hard to say, and which meant something quite different did the tongue trip over a certain letter. Of two girls who were playing tennis in half-hearted fashion, the one next Laura said ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... with equal 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 Kingsley's ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... I imagine, an itinerant doctor, for there was no town in 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
... heartily at him anywhere else; but the whole scene was past a jest; and a gleam of pathos and tenderness seemed to shine even from that doggerel,—a vista, as it were, of true genial nature, in the far distance. But as he looked round again, 'What hope,' he thought, 'of its realisation? Arcadian dreams of pastoral innocence and graceful industry, I suppose, are to be henceforth monopolised by ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... enters the rat, to eat the good things that lay in the house 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, in a mellifluous voice:— ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... 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
... 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
... Crawford's spirits. 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 of Crawford's own ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... 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 equipment of a poet. ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... it really is;—but credited with an extra-human sanction. But it would take a long time. When modern creeds are gone, to what in literature will men turn for their inspiration? —To whatever in literature contains real inspiration, you may answer. They will not sing Dr. Watts's doggerel in their churches; but such things perhaps as Wordsworth's The World is too much with us, or Henley's I am the Captain of my Soul. And then, after a long time and many racial pralayas, you can imagine such ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... 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 knitters in ...
— Ballad Book • Katherine Lee Bates (ed.)
... creature, has wisely abstained from denouncing the sacrifice of victims at the Temple of Heaven and at the Confucian Temple. But backed by Confucianism it denounces the slaughter for food of the ox which tills the soil. Some lines of doggerel to this effect, based upon the Buddhist doctrine of the transmigration of souls and put into the mouth of an ox, have ...
— Religions of Ancient China • Herbert A. Giles
... trembling. So dear is fame to the rhyming tribe, that even he, an obscure, nameless Bard, shrinks aghast at the thought of being branded as—an impertinent blockhead, obtruding his nonsense on the world; and, because he can make a shift to jingle a few doggerel Scotch rhymes together, looking upon himself as a poet of ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... cable was a theme of inspiration for innumerable sermons and a prodigious quantity of doggerel. Among the ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... 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 ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... a bill he had introduced was bitterly antagonized by a member who took occasion in his speech, while questioning the sincerity of Vance, to extol his own honesty of purpose. In replying to the vaunt of superior honesty by his opponent, Vance quoted the old Southland doggerel: ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... the questions at 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 ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... Bowers had shrewdly judged that to offer him the chairmanship would clinch his 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 ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... 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, more concrete, more real. In ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... 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 ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... 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 would our Puritan great-grandsires have said to ...
— Old News - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... I have trouble enough with my own pupil's effusions. I leave him a bit of Latin composition, and what do I find but an endless doggerel ballad on What's his name?-who hid under his father's staircase as a beggar, eating the dogs' meat, while his afflicted family were searching for ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... returned Songbird Powell. "I want every one of you to have the best times ever while you're here." His eyes glistened. "We ought to have a regular old-fashioned reunion." And then, unable to control himself, he broke out into a bit of his old-time doggerel. ...
— The Rover Boys at Big Horn Ranch - The Cowboys' Double Round-Up • Edward Stratemeyer
... books which he possessed. His two chief companions were the Bible and Fox's "Book of Martyrs." His knowledge of the Bible was such that he might have been called a living concordance; and on the margin of his copy of the "Book of Martyrs" are still legible the ill-spelled lines of doggerel in which he expressed his reverence for the brave sufferers, and his implacable enmity to the ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... 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 calamity Heaven preserve them,) they will find reasons for it thick as the leaves ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... that thrilled the people long ago, is given in the original spelling, as some test of the change effected in the others. Further, in the Appendix will be found a late example of a St. George and the Dragon doggerel Christmas play, which comes from Cornwall, and which in a slightly varying form has been played in many shires, from Wessex to Tyneside, within living memory. This shows us the last state of the traditional mystery, and the English folk-play as it became when it was left to the village wits and ...
— Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction • Anonymous
... preserved, in 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
... which it relates; for it is dedicated to Robert Rochfort, Speaker of the House of Commons; and Rochfort was Speaker from 1695 to 1699. The poet had no invention; he had evidently a minute knowledge of the city which he celebrated; and his doggerel is consequently not ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... names and addresses of visitors extending over a period of thirty-three years, many of them having also written remarks in prose, poetry, or doggerel rhyme, so we found plenty of food for thought and some amusement before we got even half way through the volume. Some of these effusions might be described as of more than ordinary merit, and the remainder as good, bad, and indifferent. Those written in foreign languages—and there ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... always the best. The metres are similarly treated, particularly the very predominant hexameter: if we transpose the words—his clever imitator says—no man would observe that he had anything else before him than simple prose; in point of effect they can only be compared to our doggerel verses.(24) The poems of Terence and those of Lucilius stand on the same level of culture, and have the same relation to each other as a carefully prepared and polished literary work has to a letter written on the spur of ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... time seems to have come when a man's expression of his 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 over Shakespeare's grave? ...
— Shakespeare's Bones • C. M. Ingleby
... that I meant no irreverence, being nulli secundus in respect for the Genius Loci, only, as a critic of English Literature, I could not help regretting that a poet gifted with every requisite for producing a satisfactory epitaph had produced a doggerel which was ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... the poem on Sierra Flat was remarkable and unprecedented. The absolute vileness of its doggerel, the gratuitous imbecility of its thought, and above all the crowning audacity of the fact that it was the work of a citizen and published in the county paper, brought it instantly into popularity. For many months Calaveras had languished for a sensation; since the last vigilance ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... 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 in his ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... with you now?" Upon which the child answered, that "this old woman had put him in a most terrible passion—that he could not bear the sight of her," &c. &c.—and then broke out into the following doggerel, which he repeated over and over, as if delighted with the vent he had ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... the party in Squire Payne's big wagon, with Thomas driving, and the cousin's pink cheeks and white plumed hat conspicuous in the midst, pass merrily on their way to a cherryless picnic at a neighboring pond, and the young college men shouted out a doggerel couplet which the wit of the party had made and set to a ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... the same Rebecca today at sixteen that I was then, at twelve and thirteen. I hope, in getting rid of my failings, that I haven't scrubbed and rubbed so hard that I have taken the gloss off the poor little virtues that lay just alongside of the faults; for as I read the foolish doggerel and the funny, funny "Remerniscences," I see on the whole a nice, well-meaning, trusting, loving heedless little creature, that after all I'd rather build on than outgrow altogether, because she is Me; the Me that was made and born ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... 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 ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... 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 ...
— The Triple Alliance • Harold Avery
... 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. ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... walked around the 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
... 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 ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... was himself a poetaster. The dedication contained some fine passages of genuine beauty and graceful versification. It was in some respects an imitation of the Lutrin of Boileau. It was very different from the doggerel in which he had taken part with his humpbacked father so long ago. Then he had blown the cow-horn, now he spoke with the tongue of a trumpet. The hero of Jasmin's Charivari was one Aduber, an old widower, who dreamt of ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... 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 parish, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, Issue 353, January 24, 1829 • Various
... sufficiently divined from the refrain, "And the tom-cat was the cause of it all." This lyric being loudly encored, the performer came forward, and, to my astonishment, began to recite a long series of doggerel verses upon Mr. ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... 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 indicate the quality of their ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... stood, the moral support, the cool-headed adviser, surrounded by a crowd of brainless, empty-headed young fops, who were even now repeating from mouth to mouth, and with every sign of the keenest enjoyment, a doggerel quatrain which he had just given forth. Everywhere the absurd, silly words met her: people seemed to have little else to speak about, even the Prince had asked her, with a little laugh, whether she appreciated her husband's latest ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... is always 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 ...
— Contribution to Passamaquoddy Folk-Lore • J. Walter Fewkes
... this last kind of Wit the double Rhymes, which are used in Doggerel Poetry, and generally applauded by ignorant Readers. If the Thought of the Couplet in such Compositions is good, the Rhyme adds [little [12]] to it; and if bad, it will not be in the Power of the Rhyme to recommend it. I am afraid that great Numbers ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... regulation gerund- grinding and Procrustean discipline of school. "The dismal change is ordained, and then—thin meagre Latin with small shreds and patches of Greek, is thrown like a pauper's pall over all your early lore; instead of sweet knowledge, vile, monkish, doggerel grammars and graduses, dictionaries and lexicons, and horrible odds and ends of dead languages are given you for your portion, and down you fall, from Roman story to a three-inch scrap of 'Scriptores Romani,'—from Greek poetry, down, down to the ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... have come when a man's expression of his 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 over Shakespeare's grave? ...
— Shakespeare's Bones • C. M. Ingleby
... 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 of Carlyle's French ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... of April, McLean laid the foundations of The Adelie Blizzard which recorded our life for the next seven months. It was a monthly publication, and contributions were invited from all on every subject but the wind. Anything from light doggerel to heavy blank verse was welcomed, and original articles, letters to the Editor, plays, reviews on books and serial stories were accepted within the limits of our supply of foolscap paper and ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... mistress was let into 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
... consists of the 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 ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... could finish this scurrilous doggerel of the court, over which, doubtless, many loose witlings had laughed, the girl's companion placed his hand on his sword and started toward the dwarf. The words died on Triboulet's lips; hastily he dodged into a narrow space between two houses, where he was safe ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... the curious in Europe, 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 ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli
... 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 favour," in "show'rs ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... 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 fault—an occasional over-consciousness of effort, and calling ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... common lot, yet flattering my ambition with day-dreams which, perhaps, would never have been realized, I was found in the twentieth year of my age by Mr. William Cookesley, a name never to be pronounced by me without veneration. The lamentable doggerel which I have already mentioned, and which had passed from mouth to mouth among people of my own degree, had by some accident or other reached his ear, and given him a curiosity to ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... 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 of popular ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... to breathe their horses, and, as the scene was 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, ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... 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 and honourable ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... than his neighbours, they set up on his land a Straw-bull, as it is called. This is a gigantic figure of a bull made of stubble on a framework of wood and adorned with flowers and leaves. Attached to it is a label on which are scrawled doggerel verses in ridicule of the man on whose land the Straw-bull ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... peruse: Thy 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 or Scotch reviewer: Ruffle ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... 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 the burghers held the city stoutly, when the money-kings ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... place to a sort of doggerel English, but they have never learned to speak the language of the country except in some of ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... annul it by reading an antiquarian paper on Woodcroft Castle, which had the effect of driving John Clare out of the room and back to his bookshop. Here he sat down, and, still under the influence of the entertainment, wrote some doggerel verses called 'The Invitation,' which Mr. Gilchrist had the cruelty to print in number one of the 'London Magazine,' in which the English public received the first information of the existence of 'John Clare, an agricultural labourer ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... nonsense. He invented what he called a "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 ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... would relate to the burden of the Saxon yoke, and his surroundings would perpetually re-echo the stories of Ireland's wrongs and woes. Any literature he might absorb would be a priest-written history of Ireland, with the rebel doggerel of 1798 and the more seductive sedition of later years. At Maynooth he meets a crowd of students like himself, crammed to the throat with his own prejudices, viewing everything from the same standpoint. He returns ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... 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 ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... 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 be ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... many of the tricks are identical with those still delighting holiday audiences; but the allusions to political events and current topics, so dear to modern purveyors of burlesque and pantomime, have no place in the entertainment. The doggerel and songs of the opening are without puns or pretensions of a comic kind, and must certainly be described as ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... by one of those strange freaks of the mind that make people do the most absurd things at the most sacred times—mourners laugh at funerals, and soldiers in the thick of battles long for puddings—he began to say over that old doggerel which he used to repeat when shivering on the spring-board over the cold waters of ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... himself by looking up the history of this visitant from the unknown world, and has published a variety of curious particulars respecting her, drawn in a measure from documents preserved in the royal archives, as well as from old-time chronicles and dissertations, Latin and German middle age doggerel, and the records of jurists, historians and theologists. Several persons are designated in the early history of the family of Hohenzollern as that unquiet soul who for some three hundred years has performed the functions of palace-ghost. Many writers agree that she was ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... private feast of any importance without the profession being represented. Their mimicry and acrobatic feats were less thought of than their long poems or lays of wars and adventures, which they recited in doggerel rhyme to the accompaniment of a stringed instrument. The doors of the chateaux were always open to them, and they had a place assigned to them at all feasts. They were the principal attraction at the Cours Plenieres, ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... "a hound," 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 ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... 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 ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... madrigal, canzonet[obs3], cento[obs3], *monody, elegy; amoebaeum, ghazal[obs3], 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[obs3], prose run mad; macaronics[obs3]; macaronic verse[obs3], leonine verse; runes. canto, stanza, distich, verse, line, couplet, triplet, quatrain; strophe, antistrophe[obs3]. verse, rhyme, assonance, crambo[obs3], meter, measure, foot, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... 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 which calamity Heaven preserve them!) ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... sufficient if the task was completed on time, but the time was up and no line was written. This meant being kept after school to write twelve lines. In this extremity. Jay Gould came to his rescue with the following doggerel:— ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... distinguished both in war 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 appeals of certain ambitious ...
— Mingo - And Other Sketches in Black and White • Joel Chandler Harris
... taken as it seems to have been by the rough versification and somewhat clumsy sarcasm of the Devil's Thoughts. The poem created something like a furore, and sold a large reissue of the number of the Morning Post in which it appeared. Nevertheless it is from the metrical point of view doggerel, as indeed the author admits, three of its most smoothly- flowing stanzas being from the hand of Southey, while there is nothing in its boisterous political drollery to put its composition beyond the reach ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... rest, he writes doggerel, and has no other pretensions that I can see. All the Elizabethans did, Shakespeare among the best of them. And I don't know that Shakespeare's doggerel is much better than Tusser's doggerel. It is something that, swimming in such a brave company, he should ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... we have now 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 manuals ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... 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 music in ...
— Edward MacDowell • John F. Porte
... 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 singers were taking part. Very often in that classic period ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... Hunchback is accordingly 'sensational.' It has in fact been called extravagant—yes, forced and unnatural. Even ordinary readers were apt to say as much of it. We well remember meeting many years ago in a well-thumbed circulating-library copy of the Hunchback of Notre Dame the following doggerel on ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... nothing about the poetry," replied my father; "no doubt it seems to you poor, silly doggerel; but I have no doubt of this, Roger, your interest and mine lie in abiding by ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... been committed 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
... 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 performance ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... 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 ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... Absalom and Achitophel, to which he refers in the exordium, are not great. Defoe prided himself upon his verse, and in a catalogue of the Poets in one of his later pieces assigned himself the special province of "lampoon." He possibly believed that his clever doggerel was a better title to immortality than Robinson Crusoe. The immediate popular effect of his satires gave some encouragement to this belief, but they are comparatively dull reading for posterity. The clever ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... 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 Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • 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 ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... 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 watchword ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... boys on the train were John Powell, better known as "Songbird," because he had a habit of reciting newly made doggerel which he called poetry, Hans Mueller, a German youth who frequently got his English badly twisted, Fred Garrison, who had graduated with ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - or The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht. • Edward Stratemeyer (AKA Arthur M. Winfield)
... the "Skeletons," and the talk among them was of the trial of the Sharkeys, which had taken place the day before. "They've 'ed six menths," said one. "And it's all along o' minjee parsons," said another; and Charlie Wilkes, who had a certain reputation for humour, did a step-dance and sang some doggerel beginning— ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... the chancel, beneath which the sacred dust of Shakespeare lies, or lay, is the first of "the last lines written, we are told," {187b} "by the author of Hamlet." Who tells us that Shakespeare wrote the four lines of doggerel? Is it conceivable that the authority for Shakespeare's authorship of the doggerel is a tradition gleaned by Mr. Dowdall of Queen's in 1693, from a parish clerk, aged over eighty, he says,—criticism makes the clerk twenty years younger. {187c} For Baconians the lines are ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... 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 out of ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... 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, ...
— The Rover Boys on the Farm - or Last Days at Putnam Hall • Arthur M. Winfield (AKA Edward Stratemeyer)
... been recited, and his knowledge of the more ungodly songs was immense. He would start off with an imitation of Mr H.B. Irving, and a very good imitation it would be—with soft music. He would leave the Signallers thrilled and silent. The lights flashed up, and "Spot" darted off on some catchy doggerel of an almost talented obscenity. In private life Spot was the best company imaginable. He could not talk for a minute without throwing in a bit of a recitation and striking an attitude. I have only ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... most skilful person in the family at playing with the baby. Once, when some friends upon whom he was calling happened to be just going out, he said, 'Leave me the baby and I shall be quite happy.' Several little fragments of letters with doggerel rhymes and anecdotes suited for children recall his playfulness with infants, and as we grew up, although we learnt to regard him with a certain awe, he conversed with us most freely, and discoursed upon politics, history, ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... Fox's Book of Martyrs. His knowledge of the Bible was such that he might have been called a living concordance; and on the margin of his copy of the Book of Martyrs are still legible the ill-spelt lines of doggerel in which he expressed his reverence for the brave sufferers, and his implacable enmity ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... religious knowledge. Sunday schools, through the energy of Mr. Raikes, were rising in various parts of the country; the poorer classes were learning to read; and nothing in the shape of cheap literature was provided to meet their new craving, except mischievous broadsheets and worthless doggerel. Hannah More set to work to supply something healthy to amuse, instruct, and edify the new order of readers. She produced regularly every month for three years, three tracts—simple, pithy, vivacious, ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... their conversation that I could liken them to nothing but to their own relations, those noble characters of men of wit and pleasure about the town. The like considerations have hindered me from dealing with the lamentable companions of their prose and doggerel. I am so far from defending my poetry against them that I will not so much as expose theirs. And for my morals, if they are not proof against their attacks, let me be thought by posterity what those authors would be thought if any memory of them or of their writings could endure so long ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... said at last to his assistant, sprawled out on the stone beside him. "That's about right, Smithy. And maybe the rest of the doggerel isn't so far off either. 'Pokin' through the crust of hell'—well, there was hell popping around here once, and I am gambling that the furnaces aren't ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... sure, to be discovered, both in the prose, as well as among the doggerel and uncouth rhymes, in which the text has been more adhered to than rhythm; but I shall feel satisfied with the result, if I succeed, even in the least degree, in affording a helping hand to present and future students ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... snow-storm, next door to the North Pole. Now, coming from the north, seeing its 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, everybody ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... changed, helps the imagination to span the interval. And the common headstone, the memorial of some dead and gone farmer or labourer who lived and died in the village hard by, is still more intimate and suggestive. The rustic, childish sculpture of the village mason and the artless doggerel of the village schoolmaster, bring back the time and place and the conditions of life much more vividly than the more scholarly inscriptions and the more artistic enrichments of monuments of greater pretensions. But where ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... Sternhold. Thomas Sternhold (ob. 1549), was the author with John Hopkins (ob. 1570), of a metrical version of the Psalms, which became a bye-word for doggerel. Sir Morgan is, of course, alluding to some pious rhymes groaned on the way to the triple tree. cf. Shadwell, The Miser (1672), I, i, 'She would be more welcome to thee than a reprieve would, if thou wert just now trolling out Hopkins and Sternhold ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... many exceptions, which had all to be learned by themselves. And 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
... to get away, to slide down out of the boy's grasp, but he held them securely till, at last grown desperate, one of them began gravely and distinctly to recite the doggerel which Monty ...
— Dorothy's House Party • Evelyn Raymond
... I mean. I tell you that if I hear it again I'll get hold of one of you, and—mind, I'm not joking—before the justice he shall go. And if I can find out who it was that made up that vile doggerel ... ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... at him anywhere else; but the whole scene was past a jest; and a gleam of pathos and tenderness seemed to shine even from that doggerel,—a vista, as it were, of true genial nature, in the far distance. But as he looked round again, 'What hope,' he thought, 'of its realisation? Arcadian dreams of pastoral innocence and graceful industry, I suppose, are to be henceforth ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... invincible activity 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 ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... mosquitoes buzzed outside.—And meanwhile the familiar, foolish noises of the garden at evening knocked at her ear. On the other side of the hedge a batch of third-form girls were whispering, with choked laughter, a doggerel rhyme which was hard to say, and which meant something quite different did the tongue trip over a certain letter. Of two girls who were playing tennis in half-hearted fashion, the one next Laura said 'Oh, damn!' every time she missed a ball. And over the parched, dusty grass the hot wind blew, carrying ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... was a very large, very old-fashioned back-comb, having a story with a moral attached, the latter recited in doggerel rhyme. ...
— Elsie at Nantucket • Martha Finley
... 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 piece ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... "thou must understand," says Bunyan to his readers, "that I never went to school to Aristotle or Plato. No; but to Paul, who taught Bunyan that what Aristotle calls magnanimity is really pride—taught him that, till there is far more of the Christian religion in those two doggerel lines at Gaius's supper-table than there is in all The Ethics taken together. And it is only from a personal experience of the same life as that which the guide puts here into his riddle that any man's proud heart will become really humble and thus really great, really ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... 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
... great stealth and caution, I had stolen to the place, I found my miniature cavern empty except for a bit of paper, on which, with a lead-pencil, had been hastily inscribed the following tantalizing bit of doggerel: ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... assonates, rather than rimes, with "glorious," but this is dangerously close to doggerel. Assonance is unsuited to the genius of any language possessed of a rich vowel-system. This is evident to any one who has read Archbishop Trench's attempt to render ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... 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 Rover Boys on the Plains - The Mystery of Red Rock Ranch • Arthur Winfield
... favoured men, who were known as gurus. Next morning the married couple were seated together in the courtyard, and the head priest or his representative tied a kanthi or necklace of wooden beads round their necks, repeating an initiatory text. [389] This silly doggerel, as shown in the footnote, is a good criterion of the intellectual capacity of the Satnamis. It is also said that during his annual progresses it was the custom for the chief priest to be allowed access to any of the wives of the Satnamis whom he might select, and that this ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... 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 ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... a number of 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 one, ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... the 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 know again anywhere, ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... town by a penance more scandalous than his offence. One night, before he acted in a farce, he appeared on the stage in a white sheet with a torch in his hand, and recited some profane and indecent doggerel, which ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 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 or literary attainment of one sort or another, ...
— Patty Fairfield • Carolyn Wells
... Dissatisfied with any of these attempts, Milton would essay himself. In 1648 he turned nine psalms, and recurring to the task in 1653, "did into verse" eight more. He thought these specimens worth preserving, and annexing to the volume of his poems which he published himself in 1673. As this doggerel continues to encumber each succeeding edition of the Poetical Works, it is as well that Milton did not persevere with his experiment and produce a complete Psalter. He prudently abandoned a task in which success is impossible. A metrical psalm, ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... then Prince William of Prussia, was sent here with his tutors; and there is a story, preserved with great pride, of a fight on the beach between him and a bathing-machine boy, at whose father's property the Prince was throwing stones. An account of this historic battle is preserved in a doggerel ballad, printed and sold locally, and composed Heaven knows where, which is called "Tapping the War-Lord's Claret: Why Kaiser ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... and take a look around and watch for Tom," replied his brother. "Say, but I'm glad Songbird is coming," he added. "I don't care much for his doggerel, but John's a good ...
— The Rover Boys at College • Edward Stratemeyer
... his little doggerel lay;—One truth I tell, in sorrow tell it: I'm forced to give my verse away, Because, alas! I cannot ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... Jesuit, wrote Reflections on Inevitable Death, Common to All. His short doggerel rimes, which breathe a jovial gaiety, were long extremely popular. In recent times suspicion has been cast on Baka's authorship of the work. (Adapted ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... he does it with fear and trembling. So dear is fame to the rhyming tribe, that even he, an obscure, nameless Bard, shrinks aghast at the thought of being branded as—an impertinent blockhead, obtruding his nonsense on the world; and, because he can make a shift to jingle a few doggerel Scotch rhymes together, looking upon himself as a poet of no small ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... this rendered him service in designing his coat of 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, ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... inspired by Bonaparte's uninterrupted progress. England is confronted by the most formidable adversary whom she has ever known, and her defence is entrusted to Canning and Perceval. Canning's armoury contains nothing more serviceable than "schoolboy jokes and doggerel rhymes, an affronting petulance, and the tones and gesticulations of Mr. Pitt." Perceval, instead of looking ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... said Alice; "I could not venture on a stanza before you. You cannot imagine what doggerel I make ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... written language offering unlimited facilities for 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 a ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... globe at the corner lighted their frolics. He was peevish and irritable, that they knew; but the spirit of adventure lured them into teasing him. They joined hands before him, and, keeping time with their bodies, chanted in his face weird and uncomplimentary doggerel. At first he snarled curses at them—curses he had learned from the lips of various foremen. Finding this futile, and remembering his dignity, ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... 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 Dr. Coues. The following ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various
... striving hard, under difficulties, for so many things distant and near; we may fancy him busy enough;—and are surprised at the fractions of light Jordan Correspondence which he still finds time for. Pretty bits of Letters, in prose and doggerel, from and to those Moravian Villages; Jordan, "twice a week," bearing the main weight; Friedrich, oftener than one could hope, flinging some word of answer,—very intent on Berlin gossip, we can notice. "Vattel is still here, your Majesty," [OEuvres, xvii. 163, &c.] insinuates Jordan:—young ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... 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 ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... 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 Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... 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 one man against a dozen. The ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... 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 ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... pursuit was emphasized by the notorious fact that his handiwork fell together in the middle, faded like shadows from bronze to hoary pallor; its longevity was a protracted death. In short, his arbors broke under the weight of a purpose, as poems become doggerel in the service of a theorist. Truly, Alcott was completely at the beck of illusion; and he was always safer alone with it than near the hard uses of adverse reality. I well remember my astonishment when ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... troops became so disheartened that they refused to engage the enemy, notwithstanding their taunts and their marching round the imperial camp with the head of a dead person decked out in a widow's cap and singing a doggerel ballad to the effect that none of Vouti's generals was to be feared. In the next campaign Vouti was able to restore his declining fortunes by the timely discovery of a skillful general in the person of Weijoui, who, taking advantage of the division of the ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... expense, and it 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 ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... (de muy mala e corrupta letra), 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, ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... soon began to be whispered about that to encounter the specter was a sure augury of impending calamity. A local poet, long since forgotten, was inevitably inspired to preserve the legend in his rustic doggerel. I ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... date 1632. Kirby Moorside has preserved, in 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
... she said, "but it is a jester's dollar, the fee of a clown. Don't you see, Martin, the whole thing is lowering. I want the man I love and honor to be something finer and higher than a perpetrator of jokes and doggerel." ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... as if inspired to a wilder flight by his own minstrelsy, the jongleur, sweeping his hand over the chords, broke forth into an air admirably expressive of the picture which his words, running into a rude, but lively and stirring doggerel, attempted to paint. ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... distich, lyric, elegy, eclogue, idyl, madrigal, epic, ode, georgic, cid, rondeau, epilogue, epigram, elegiac, roundelay, dithyramb, dithyrambic, doggerel, rhapsody. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... day) the world was greatly amused at an 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 with a corrected ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... 6-line stanza is the tail-rime or rime couA(C)e, a stanza much used in the Middle English romances and chosen by Chaucer for his parody, Sir Thopas. Harry Bailey, mine host of the Canterbury pilgrims, called it 'doggerel rime.' The simple and probably normal form is aa^{4}b^{3}cc^{4}b^{3} or aa^{4}b^{3}aa^{4}b^{3}, which to save space in ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... 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 music less often ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... happiness to the sun; each morning they greeted its return with laughter of joy in that another happy day had begun. They made no plans, but fished, gathered mussels and abalones, and climbed among the rocks as the moment moved them. The abalone meat they pounded religiously to a verse of doggerel improvised by Saxon. Billy prospered. Saxon had never seen him at so keen a pitch of health. As for herself, she scarcely needed the little hand-mirror to know that never, since she was a young girl, had there been such color in her cheeks, ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... 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 ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... 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, rather a dull creature—at least people seemed to think so—and he seldom felt at ease even with ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... are not, however, confined to a judicious selection of words to suit the air. There is often a quaint local humour conveyed in the doggerel verses; the charm being greatly enhanced by the introduction of creole slang and mispronounced Spanish. Fragments of these effusions occasionally degenerate into street sayings, which are in everybody's mouth till the next carnival. One of the most popular during a certain ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... octosyllabic verse, frequently not rising above doggerel: it is full of verbal "quips and cranks and wanton wiles:" in parts it is eminently epigrammatic, and many of its happiest couplets seem to have been dashed off without effort. Walpole calls Butler "the Hogarth of poetry;" and we know that Hogarth illustrated Hudibras. The comparison ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... 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 on ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... courteous gentleman, profound student of Shakespeare! When the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy was raging in America (it really did rage there!) Jefferson wrote the most delicious doggerel about it. He ridiculed, and his ridicule killed the Bacon enthusiasts all the more dead because it was barbed ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... there is nothing 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 ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... depth, it has more than once been most successfully and amusingly hoaxed. One of these cases was when a correspondent contributed an extraordinary Greek inscription, which he asserted had been recently discovered. This so-called inscription was in reality nothing but some English doggerel of anything but a ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
Copyright © 2025 Diccionario ingles.com
|
|
|
