"Doggerel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with a list of my works. Here is an article on the writings of Victor Hugo, another on an American book called "Confessions of a Poet," a whole heap of verses, among which sundry doggerel epistles to you; and last, not least, the present voluminous prose performance for ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... 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 ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... 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, of Ariosto's ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... terms with all about him that he could even give ear to the whine of a beggar. The man was sitting on the steps between the pillars of a colonnade, with a tame crow perched upon his fist, and as Democrates passed he began his doggerel prayer:— ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... a theme of inspiration for innumerable sermons and a prodigious quantity of doggerel. Among the ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... will, and we're 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 ...
— Patty Fairfield • Carolyn Wells
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... 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 ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... which the plates only are good is but a Barmecide feast, after all. The letter-press to this "Life in Paris" is the vilest rubbish imaginable,—a farrago of St. Giles's slang, Tottenham Court Road doggerel, ignorance, lewdness, and downright dulness. Mr. John Cumberland, of Ludgate Hill, took, accordingly, very little by his motion. The "Life" fell almost stillborn from the press; and George Cruikshank must have regretted that he ever had anything to do with it. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... individual who was first saved in the Cambria. This man was wheeling himself in a go-cart on the race-ground at Lanark, dressed in sailor's costume, and selling papers with a picture of the Kent upon them and some doggerel verses below. As honorary secretary of the "Open-Air Mission" (which provides preachers for streets in towns, and for races and fairs in the country), the "first saved" from the wreck and burning then ...
— The Loss of the Kent, East Indiaman, in the Bay of Biscay - Narrated in a Letter to a Friend • Duncan McGregor
... 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 ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... extraordinary English doggerel rhyme which I took down, though it seems singularly incoherent when written out at length. These rhymes are repeated by the old men as a sort of chant, and when a line comes that is more than usually irregular they seem to take a real delight ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... after he is gone, will be enrolled among us. The public insist on being admitted to his history, and their curiosity will not go unsatisfied. [Cheers.] His letters are hunted up, his journals are sifted; his sayings in conversation, the doggerel which he writes to his brothers and sisters are collected, and stereotyped in print. [Laughter.] His fate overtakes him. He cannot escape from it. We cry out, but it does not appear that men sincerely resist the liberty ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... first, constantly filled on service-days with eager worshipers. Here she gave exhortations, and prophesied in a species of religious frenzy or convulsion, sometimes uttering very heavy prose, and sometimes the most fearful doggerel rhyme resembling—well—perhaps our album effusions here at home! Indeed, I can think of nothing else equally fearful. In these paroxysms, Joanna raved like an ancient Pythoness whirling on her tripod, and to just about the same purpose. Yet, it was astonishing ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... enclosed doggerel. Last night, round one of our fires, we were alluding to the various uses we have made of that deadly weapon, the bayonet, and it was suggested that I, as a Spring Poet, should record them in verse, hence ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... with a chorus of drunken apprentices and riotous boys, to the spot where the humpbacked tinker had dragged his passive burden. The foul green pond near Master Sancroft's hostel reflected the glare of torches; six of the tymbesteres, leaping and wheeling, with doggerel song and discordant music, gave the signal for ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... regard it as the highest of motives to moral action? In the days when Kant's idea of the "moral imperative" was in the ascendant, the belief got abroad that the essence of virtue was to do what you hated doing. Looking back to my Oxford days, I recall some doggerel lines, of German origin, in which this belief finds apt expression. A disciple who is in trouble about his ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... 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
... 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
... partly because he knew by experience that the lessons he wished to inculcate were more likely to be remembered in that form. Mr. Froude, who takes a higher estimate of Bunyan's verse than is commonly held, remarks that though it is the fashion to apply the epithet of "doggerel" to it, the "sincere and rational meaning" which pervades his compositions renders such an epithet improper. "His ear for rhythm," he continues, "though less true than in his prose, is seldom wholly at fault, and whether in prose or verse, he had the superlative ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... Satires, No. 2287.] the "Queen of Common-Sense" is shown presenting "Henry Fielding, Esq.," with a well-filled purse, while to "Harlequin" (John Rich of Covent Garden) she extends a halter; and in some doggerel lines underneath, reference is made to the "show'rs of Gold" resulting from the piece. This, of course, might be no more than a poetical fiction; but Fielding himself attests the pecuniary success of Pasquin in the Dedication to Tumble-Down Dick, and Mrs. Charke's statement in her ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... 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." They spilled ...
— Vigee Le Brun • Haldane MacFall
... 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 appear in the paper ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... wealth, forsooth," says the Dean, wrathfully, "and might have had both wealth and fame had his love for King James not turned his head. I have heard much of the colonies, and have read that doggerel 'Sot Weed Factor' which tells of the gluttonous life of ease you lead in your own province. You can have no men of mark from such conditions, Mr. Carvel. Tell me," he adds contemptuously, "is genius ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... 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 as these coming to be ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... 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 instrument allowed. Judged as hymnology or poetry, the Bay "Psalm ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... wild-fire, and blaze over every opposition; and if this be the case, there is no use in mincing the matter; Ireland is gone, and the death-blow of England is struck; and this event may happen INSTANTLY—before Mr. Canning and Mr. Hookham Frere have turned Lord Howick's last speech into doggerel rhymne; before "the near and dear relations" have received another quarter of their pension, or Mr. Perceval conducted the Curates' Salary Bill safely to a third reading. If the mind of the English people, ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... through the entire colonial period the most popular domestic reading of the Puritan home. These were The Bay Psalm Book (1640), which was the first book published in America; Michael Wigglesworth's (1631-1705) Day of Doom (1662), a doggerel poem; and the New England Primer (c. 1690), called "the Little Bible." The sole voice heard in opposition was Thomas Morton's satirical New English Canaan (1637), whose author was sent out of the colony for the scandal of Merrymount, but satire itself remained religious in Ward's Simple Cobbler ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the little room his eyes caught some writing on the wall. There were several bits of doggerel, one ...
— The Mystery at Putnam Hall - The School Chums' Strange Discovery • Arthur M. Winfield
... 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
... doggerel, 'A Noble Personality,' is the most utter trash possible, and it couldn't have ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... 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 ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... Something in these doggerel lines excited Jack Vance's wrath above measure, the last verse especially raising his anger to boiling-point, so that it fairly bubbled over. Jack was a loyal-hearted youngster; he was nothing to Allingford, but Allingford was something to him, as ...
— The Triple Alliance • Harold Avery
... name, Papa. I am afraid you might have him flayed alive, while the poor fellow deserves nothing but laughter for his doggerel." And while this doggerel was secretly pressed by her bosom, she stole a look at L'Isle, and was surprised to see how little galled he seemed to ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... 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
... stomach for fight without wages, accepted the passports proffered by Parma. They revenged themselves for the harsh treatment which they had received from Casimir and from the states-general, by singing, everywhere as they retreated, a doggerel ballad—half Flemish, half German—in which their wrongs ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... 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
... doggerel rhyme written of the establishment that runs very much in the same strain in which I have ...
— The Gourmet's Guide to Europe • Algernon Bastard
... utterance in a certain range of idiosyncrasy than by this poet. Hardly a piece of his, large or small, but has "snap" and raciness. He puts in cantering rhyme (often doggerel) much cutting irony and idiomatic ear-cuffing of the kirk-deacons—drilygood-natured addresses to his cronies, (he certainly would not stop us if he were here this moment, from classing that "to the De'il" among ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... 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
... to insult me?" exclaimed Angelica, in an angry tone, as she continued to read on the doggerel which Tom had substituted for those Billy had given him. Just then the major, turning round, saw his daughter with a paper in her hand, and Billy standing by her side. He, supposing it to be a formal proposal ...
— The Three Admirals • W.H.G. Kingston
... flutter 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 Robespierre had ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... 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
... (This doggerel came in answer to a question whether the Spirits could write poetry, and is in a hand not dissimilar to the preceding communication, although the ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission
... to triumph sometimes. He was a perfectly sound and healthy, well-grown boy and a friend who was with him at "the Shop" says he can remember no apparent trace of unhappiness, and is full of tales of his jokes and his fun, his quaint caricatures and doggerel rhymes, his love of flowers and nature, his hospitalities, and his joy in getting his friends to meet and know and like each other. Though he made no mark at Woolwich he did carry off the prize for ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... having finished his errand, or not liking his entertainment. Dee opened the billet—a bit of parchment—and out dropped the ring! In the envelope was a mystical scroll, encompassed with magic emblems, wherein was written the following doggerel, either in blood or coloured ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... 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, and literature, and his personal recollections, as if ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... could be made up of the doggerel rhymes frequently made use of in bygone days in which the prospective thief was warned off under penalties of a prison, or even of a worse ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... excitement that this attack created found voice in a ballad called 'The Devonshire Boys' Courage, 1690.' It is utter doggerel, but expresses the contemporary views of the people, and was sung to a tune called 'Liggan Water,' a title that, according to Mr William Chappell, refers to an Irish stream. I give ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... confused the real valley that interested him so with Scott's ideal Glendearg, and, partly for this reason, to have found a greater pleasure in "The Monastery," which he thereupon undertook to paraphrase in verse. There remain some hundreds of doggerel rhymes; but his affection for that particular novel survived the fatal facility of his octosyllabics, and reappears time after time ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... politely—"McTurk"—the Irishman scowled—"and, of course, the unspeakable Beetle, our friend Gigadibs." Abanazar, the Emperor, and Aladdin had more or less of characters, and King passed them over. "Come forth, my inky buffoon, from behind yonder instrument of music! You supply, I presume, the doggerel for this entertainment. Esteem yourself to be, as it ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... 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 in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... 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 ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... feel 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 ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... 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
... 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 in Alaska," ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... feast are also excessive. For example, you make a tug-of-war with your neighbour at table, and the rope is a fragile packet of tinselled paper, which breaks with a report like a pistol. You open your half of the packet, and discover some doggerel verse which you read aloud, and also a perfectly idiotic coloured cap, which you put on your head to the end of looking foolish. And this ceremony is continued until the whole table is surrounded by preposterous headgear, and doggerel verse ...
— The Feast of St. Friend • Arnold Bennett
... 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 ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... festa day in the golden afternoon the embroidery-seller and his donkey-cart and his small son and his yellow dog and Livio Ceresole walked to Castoleto. Livio, who had a sweet voice, sang snatches of melody in many languages; doggerel songs, vulgarities from musical comedies, melodies of the street corner; and the singer's voice redeemed and made music of them all. He was practising his songs for use at the hotels, where he sang and played the banjo in the evenings, to ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... dignity of the wreath by classing Chaucer and Spenser, as we have seen, among its wearers. The genuine claims of Warton to respect probably saved him from the customary attacks. Bating a few bungling thrusts amid the doggerel of "Peter Pindar," he escaped scathless,—gaining, on the other hand, a far more than ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... is said to have "a dogged disposition." Any one very much fatigued is said to be "dog weary." A wretched room or house is often called "a dog hole," or said to be only fit for "a dog." Very poor verse is "doggerel." It is told of Lady Mary Wortley Montague, that when a young nobleman refused to translate some inscription over an alcove, because it was in "dog-latin," she observed, "How strange a puppy shouldn't ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... 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 ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... battle, and returned with glory." Another pleasant little jest was that perpetrated by Suwarrow, who, after the bloody battle of Tourtourskaya, announced the result to his mistress in an epigram of two doggerel lines. This was the terrible warrior who used to sleep almost naked in a room of suffocating heat, and rush out to review his troops in a linen jacket, with the thermometer of Reaumur ten degrees below freezing point. Of the Emperor ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... 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
... Guadalajara, 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, ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... our tired limbs in a discussion of literary tastes and standards, our workmates had been relieving the treadmill tedium of the long afternoon by various expedients. The quartet at the table immediately in front of us had been making inane doggerel rhymes upon the names of their workmates, telling riddles, and exchanging nasty stories with great gusto and frequent fits of wild laughter. At another table the forthcoming ball of the "Moonlight Maids" was under hot discussion, and at a very long table in front of the ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... had paused here, 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 ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... who had never been Dabling beyond the Height of Ballading; Who, in his brisk Essays, durst ne'er excel The lucky Flight of rhyming Doggerel, Sets up with this sufficient Stock on Stage, And has, perchance, the luck to please the Age. He draws you in, like cozening Citizen; Cares not how bad the Ware, so ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... to Kinmont Willie, I merely give such reasons as I can find for thinking that Scott HAD "mangled" fragments of an old ballad before him, and did not merely paraphrase the narrative of Walter Scott of Satchells, in his doggerel True History of the ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... of Morning Prayer a couple of Sundays ago? The rogue! I certainly was keeping the run of the service, but it was edifying to see his head bowed so devoutly until he passed a slip of paper over to me. What do you think was on it? Not a suddenly inspired hymn, but some doggerel lines about ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock
... the events to 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 without historical value. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... drawn for illustration or refutation in the heat of some strenuous argument; caricatures in the same medium, some of them trenchantly like, of the customers as well as of certain artistic celebrities, whose laurels Brodonowski's had not approved, varied here and there by an epigram or a doggerel couplet, damning ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... imitation during that period of weaker and ever weaker French models—the last faint echoes of the Roman de la Rose and the first extravagances of the Rhetoriqueurs. Skelton, on the other hand, with all his vigour, represents the English tendency to prosaic doggerel. Whether Wyatt and his younger companion deliberately had recourse to Italian example in order to avoid these two dangers it would be impossible to say. But the example was evidently before them, and ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... metrical versions of the Psalms often inclined to doggerel, and though they probably had little, if any, influence on the Authorized Version, they made their own claims to accuracy, and even after the appearance of the King James Bible sometimes demanded attention as improved renderings. ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... 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 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, reading ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... 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 cruel tale gained credibility and moral force from the very homeliness ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... command devolved upon Captain William Hope. It must have been a distressing moment for Flinders, despite the intense excitement of action, when his friend and commander fell; it was indeed, as will be seen, a crucial moment in his career. A doggerel bard of the time enshrined the event in a verse as badly in need of surgical aid as were the ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... 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
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... music as a child jumps into a whirling skipping-rope. She had a quaint French accent, but she couldn't sing. She had no voice. And after that one doggerel verse she made a gesture of good-humoured contempt and danced. But she couldn't dance either. It was a wild gymnastic—a display of incredible, riotous energy, the delirious caperings of a gutter-urchin caught in the midst of some gutter-urchin's windfall ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... over-tasteful finery, the lady sometimes with finery stripped from the altars. Then, glass in hand he might joyously cry, "The sharp sword is my farm and plundering is my plough; earth is my bed, the sky my covering, this cloak is my house, this wine my paradise;" or chant the doggerel stave which said that "when a soldier was born three boors were given him, one to find him food, another to find him a comely lass, a third to go to perdition in his stead." But when the country had been eaten up, when the burghers held the city stoutly, when the money-kings refused to ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... 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
... 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 1692, for instance, Houghton ...
— The Enclosures in England - An Economic Reconstruction • Harriett Bradley
... 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
... 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
... wizardry, Night's spells do pass at sunrise; marvellous poems sink to doggerel, mighty dreams to blown ashes and solids regain weight. Miss Betty, waking at daybreak, saw the motes dancing in the sun at her window, and watched them with a placid, unremembering eye. She began to stare at them in a puzzled way, while a look of wonder slowly ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... me that maybe they are mainly yours. Let us say that they are both yours and mine, or perhaps, if the world finds anything good in them, any humour, any pathos, any racy touches of our rugged people, you will permit me to determine their ownership in the way of this paraphrase of Coleridge's doggerel version of ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... more than mere neglect, for he seems to have been a light-hearted, headstrong, extravagant man, with no capacity for business. He had not even the supreme quality, associated in doggerel with Dutchmen, of giving too little and asking too much. Consequently, when he died poor and enfeebled, in years when his collection of works of fine art had been sold at public auction for a fraction of its value, when his pictures had been seized for debt, ...
— Rembrandt • Josef Israels
... company, they did not withhold their ear from the Bellman's Chant. As twelve o'clock approached—their last midnight upon earth—they would interrupt the most spirited discourse, they would check the tour of the mellowest bottle to listen to the solemn doggerel. 'All you that in the condemn'd hole do lie,' groaned the Bellman of St. Sepulchre's in his duskiest voice, and they who held revel in the condemned hole prayed silence of their friends for the ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... said Sinclair; "and now that we know that, we're going to find it. Of course, we assumed there was one, but we had only that foolish doggerel to prove it. Now this regular bill establishes it as a fact beyond all doubt. Do you know this Martin ...
— Patty's Friends • Carolyn Wells
... 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
... which I strayed one evening, one of the nigger corner-men sang a song of which the nature may be 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
... farmer is later of getting in his harvest 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 is ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... 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 founded a historic ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... that a boy should own all these adjuncts and many others—quickness of perception, unlimited daring, and alertness to make a jockey. No truer summing up of the necessary qualifications is there than the old and famous "Father Bill" Daly's doggerel and appended note: ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... 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 ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... equipped, they call on the farmer, and inquire, "please, sir, do you want your trees worsled?" They then proceed to the orchard, and encircling one of the largest and best-bearing trees, chant in a low voice a certain doggerel rhyme; and this ended, all shout in chorus, with the exception of the trumpeter, who blows a loud blast. During the ceremony they rap the trees with their sticks. "Thus going from tree to tree, or group to group, they wassail the whole orchard; this finished, they proceed to the house of ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... Helen's armor, again. She might make the remaining five hundred-something miles, alone...! He just barely managed to accomplish it... There was still a little juice, from his chemical cell, feeding his helmet phone... Now, he thought he heard someone singing raucously one of those improvised doggerel songs of ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... monotony of imprisonment brought to light many talents for camaraderie which amused not only the suffrage prisoners but the "regulars." Locked in separate cells, as in the District Jail, the suffragists could still communicate by song. The following lively doggerel to the tune of "Captain Kidd" was sung in chorus to the accompaniment of a hair comb. It became a saga. Each day a new verse was added, relating the day's particular controversy with the ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... he accepted the challenge and repeated the doggerel as he planted his bare feet in the water. She splashed him and he retaliated, but the boy, though smaller, was agile, and in an unguarded moment he caught the girl by the wrists and pushed her so she sat squarely in the shallow waters ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... royal amusements in the time of Charles the Second were horse-racing and theatrical performances. The King kept an establishment at Newmarket, where, according to Strutt, "he entered horses and ran them in his name." And the author of some doggerel verses, ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... 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 ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... woman teacher opened a school after getting twenty-five pupils at $25 each for the year's tuition. I shall never forget that Mr. Cross did not belie his name, however, or that Sam Clemens wrote a bit of doggerel about him." ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... a skit about a bit of doggerel which was then making nights and days unhappy for many undeserving persons who in an evil moment had fallen upon it in some stray newspaper corner. A certain car line had recently adopted the "punch system," ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... 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 their front:— ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... 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 he elaborately ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... a doggerel couplet which typifies this spirit better than anything I can write, and ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... placed at the disposal of Franklin; among these were 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 art of composition ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... about this time he appears to have struck upon the vein which he was to work with such vigour and popularity. He turned his attention to abuses in Church and State, which he lashed with caustic satire, conveyed in short doggerel rhyming lines peculiar to himself, in which jokes, slang, invectives, and Latin quotations rush out pell-mell. His best works in this line are Why come ye not to Court? and Colin Clout, both directed ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... 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 ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... in Staffordshire.—On the feast of St. Clement's (Nov. 23) the children go round to the various houses in the villages to which they belong singing the following doggerel: ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 217, December 24, 1853 • Various
... 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
... 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
... another and a most spirited example 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 it was ...
— Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction • Anonymous
... philosophy, to the temple of Aphrodite;" nor anymore "sweetly reasonable" will he seem to the ordinary innocent, conventional Churchman in asserting that the God of righteousness is displeased and disserved by men uttering such doggerel hymns as "Out of my stony griefs Bethel I'll raise," and "My Jesus to know, and feel His blood flow;" or in asserting that the modern preacher, who calls people infidels for false views of the Bible, should have the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... the patriotic duty of combining a display of loyalty to their sovereign with a proportionate degree of disloyalty to the captain and owner who were responsible for supplying them with food that even a Russian serf might have felt justified in complaining about. So a doggerel verse was composed and sung fervently to a modified form of the National Anthem by way of intimating their grievance forcefully to the notice of their commander. Relevancy did not come within the compass of their thoughts; ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... murderer hanged this morning. The mob, which was immense, demanded Knox 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 ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... Well said . . . to thee. Printed in doggerel form in Qq, the lines ending with hands, ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... Lessons for breakfast, and Sums for my tea, Learnt to play the Arithmetic nicely, And gained all the prizes at School—don't you see, For construing Doggerel concisely. ...
— Dick, Marjorie and Fidge - A Search for the Wonderful Dodo • G. E. Farrow
... 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 ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... "bon-fire," which is situated in an adjoining field. Another party go round to the different houses, grotesquely attired, supplicating contributions for the "tar barrels," and at each house, after receiving a donation, chant a few doggerel verses and huzza! It is, however, well that people should contribute towards defraying the expense, for if they do not get enough money they commit sad depredations, and if any one is seen carrying a barrel they ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 282, November 10, 1827 • Various
... can quote the hymns if they've got any merit at all. Otherwise I shall drag in the psalms. Hymns aren't very quotable as a rule. Shocking doggerel most of 'em!..." ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... 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 ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... devising any, even fanciful, reason for such a supposition; upon which the comment of some foolish critic is," The sharpness of the satire is said to have stung the man so much that he never forgave it. "We have heard of the sting in the tail atoning for the brainless head; but in this doggerel the tail is surely as stingless as the head is brainless. For, 1st, Ten in the Hundred could be no reproach in Shakspeare's time, any more than to call a man Three-and-a-half-per-cent. in this present year, 1838; except, indeed, amongst those foolish persons ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... he took in recasting this doggerel—calling in Vivie to help him as presumably a good scholar in French—got on her nerves, and she was hard put to it ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... misery, discussing the "bating" of the Unionist party, or, as I saw them yesterday evening, listening to the crooning of an ancient female gutter-snipe, a dun-coloured heap of decrepit wretchedness, chanting the great future of the Irish Parliament in a picturesque and extraordinary doggerel anent the "larned reprisintatives of the Oirish na-a-tion. Promiscu-o-ous they shtand in em-u-la-a-tion." The small shopkeepers, once ardent Nationalists, seem to be changing their minds. One of them confided to me the fact that he and his fellows, brought actually ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... 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 weight)—one of ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... given place to a sort of doggerel English, but they have never learned to speak the language of the country except in some ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... have been an Englishman). This facetious dignitary had suggested that the roof should be taken off the Palace at Viterbo where they sat, to allow the divine influences to descend more freely on their counsels (quia nequeunt ad nos per tot tecta ingredi). According to some, these doggerel verses, current on the occasion, were extemporised by Cardinal John in the pious exuberance ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... Orpheus, her husband, to hell for her recovery, with which Virgil closes the fourth Georgic, is among the most exquisite passages in all Latin poetry. Pope made it the subject of his Ode on St. Cecilia's Day; but if Pluto and Proserpine really relented at the doggerel that the English poet puts into the mouth of the half-divine minstrel, they cannot deserve the title of illacrymabiles which Horace gives them. Some of the pedantic scientists (to borrow a new word) have discovered in this tale of true ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... very lewedness,* *stupidity, ignorance That, all so wisly* God my soule bless, *surely Mine eares ache for thy drafty* speech. *worthless Now such a rhyme the devil I beteche:* *commend to This may well be rhyme doggerel," quoth he. "Why so?" quoth I; "why wilt thou lette* me *prevent More of my tale than any other man, Since that it is the best rhyme that I can?"* *know "By God!" quoth he, "for, plainly at one word, Thy drafty rhyming is not worth ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... 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 ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... spite,—an Afrit, a Djinn, a Ghoul, a spawn of Sheitan. How that monstrous orange-tawny head grinned and wagged! How those flaps of ears were projected forwards, like unto those of a dog! How balefully those atrabilious eyes glistened! You laughed, and yet you shuddered. He spoke in mere doggerel and slang. He sang trumpery songs to negro melodies. He danced the Lancashire clog-hornpipe; he rattled out puns and conundrums; yet did he contrive to infuse into all this mummery and buffoonery, into this salmagundi ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... least emotional, must use the forms of poetical expression sparingly; must use them more freely as the emotion rises; and must carry them to their greatest extent, only where the emotion reaches a climax. The entire contravention of these principles results in bombast or doggerel. The insufficient respect for them is seen in didactic poetry. And it is because they are rarely fully obeyed, that so much ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... 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
... saying when making a swop or change of one toy for another, and no bargain is supposed to be concluded between boys and girls unless they interlock fingers—the little finger on the right hand—and repeat the following doggerel:— ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... of verse of more than Franklinian foulness, rhymes eulogizing Gilbert Tennent, and a manual of arms. The title-page wore the coronet and plumes of the Prince of Wales. Franklin ridiculed his rival's magazine in doggerel verse; his own he made no mention of in his autobiography. Its publication ceased ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... 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 ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... which he expressed by these symbols offered to him, and he had refused it; and he was alone in the grey street, with its lamps just twinkling through the dreary twilight, the blast of a ribald chorus sounding from the main road, a doggerel hymn whining from some parlor, to the accompaniment of the harmonium. He wondered why he had turned away from that woman who knew all secrets, in whose eyes were all the mysteries. He opened the desk of his bureau, and ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... and was looking through some printed slips in his pocket-book. "I wanted you to see some of the fellow's articles in print, but I have nothing of importance here—only some of his 'doggerel,' as he calls it, and you've had a sample of that. But here's a bit of the upper spirit of the man—and still another that you should hear him recite. You can keep them both if you care to. The boys all fell in love with that last one, particularly, ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... opened with the singing of a popular hymn which carried a refrain catchy enough but running to doggerel. Another hymn followed and another. ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... After the Revolution, he attempted to make his peace with the 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 he called his ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 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 account of ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... poetical satire, which are sufficient to show that he lacked either the talent or the patience to write political verse. Compared with Dryden's or Pope's, his work is mere doggerel, enlivened by ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... obnoxious 'printed bookes' have survived to the present time, and it has been contended that they were probably nothing more than ballads and copies of doggerel verses. But this is an hypercritical objection, or rather groundless guess, for it is evident that the proclamation points at something far more important. We may safely conclude that they were newspapers, and that journalism had already attained sufficient dimensions to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... and dank scrap of paper from beneath her apron. Of a truth she could not read its contents, for they were writ in English in the form of a doggerel rhyme which caused Chauvelin to utter ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... 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 of the contrapuntalists. (I don't mean the great men; I mean the Wagenseils, Gossecs ...
— Haydn • John F. Runciman
... 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
... book. Now the 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 ...
— A Practical Discourse on Some Principles of Hymn-Singing • Robert Bridges
... inclination to revolt against the barbarous doggerel in which the instruction is, as a rule, conveyed, and against the tedious process of perusing a series of productions which follow mainly the same lines. But it is to be recollected that these manuals ...
— Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine • William Carew Hazlitt
... 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
... unlikely to have suggested the doggerel of Sir Benjamin Backbite; and the scandalous conversation in this scene, though far inferior in delicacy and ingenuity to that of Sheridan, has somewhat, as the reader will see, of ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... 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 paper, and ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders |
