"Doggerel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... psychological disturbance was enough to provoke an excess of poetry. The character and manner of the verse might vary with the predisposing cause. A gentleman who had dined too freely might disexpand himself in a short fit of lyric doggerel in which "bowl" and "soul" were freely rhymed. The morning's indigestion inspired a long-drawn elegiac, with "bier" and "tear," "mortal" and "portal" linked in sonorous sadness. The man of politics, from time to time, grateful to an appreciative country, ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... 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 Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... too that doggerel, 'A Noble Personality,' is the most utter trash possible, and it couldn't have ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... in the metrical history of Rouen, composed by a minstrel ycleped Poirier, the limper. This little tract is a chap-book at Rouen: most towns, in the north of France and Belgium, possess such chronicle ballads in doggerel rhyme, which are much read, and eke chaunted, ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... two 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, ...
— History of the United States, Vol. I (of VI) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... 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 the best essay on the South African War. With it he made his first appearance in print, for it was ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... verses for all these if we take pains to search, and if we eschew ignorant and unpoetic modern doggerel as we eschew poison. Besides the nursery rhymes, we have Stevenson, with his "Wind," "Shadow," and "Swing," Christina Rossetti's "Wrens and Robins," her "Rainbow Verses" and "Brownie, Brownie, let down your milk, White as swansdown, smooth as silk." There are many others, and a recent ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... 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
... 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
... 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
... story is founded on the adventures of land-buyers in their endeavours to evade the spirit and obey the letter of land regulations. In 1891 a rhymester wrote in doggerel somewhat as follows of the experiences of a selector who "took up" ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... 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 who built ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... of June 30, 1716, we find a doggerel old mug-house ballad, which is so characteristic of the violence of the times that it ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... 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 ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... much inward resentment of the folly of the thing, Salisbury told his tale, and repeated reluctantly the absurd intelligence and the absurder doggerel of the scrap of paper, expecting to hear Dyson burst out ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... 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. ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... of St. Agatha. All the young unmarried women who chanced to meet the procession extended the first two fingers of the left hand pointing towards the rabbit, at the same time repeating the following doggerel:— ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... previously—the townsmen employ themselves in hagging furze for the "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 ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 282, November 10, 1827 • Various
... which consisted absolutely and almost entirely in keeping boys for eight or ten years at learning the rules of Latin and Greek grammar, construing certain Latin and Greek authors, and possibly making verses which, had they been English verses, would have been condemned as abominable doggerel,—if that is what you mean by liberal education, then I say it is scandalously insufficient and almost worthless. My reason for saying so is not from the point of view of science at all, but from the point of view of literature. I say the thing professes to be literary education that ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... 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 left to the village wits and ...
— Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction • Anonymous
... the best ever!" Tom declared, and they started with much enthusiasm, taking with them "Songbird" Powell, a school chum addicted to the making of doggerel which he called poetry, Fred Garrison, a plucky boy who had stood by them through thick and thin, and Hans Mueller, a German youth who was still struggling with the mysteries of the English tongue. With the ...
— The Rover Boys on the Farm - or Last Days at Putnam Hall • Arthur M. Winfield (AKA Edward Stratemeyer)
... formation of the latter. Chinese riddles, by which term we include conundrums, charades, et hoc genus omne, are similar to our own, and occupy quite as large a space in the literature of the country. They are generally in doggerel, of which the following may be taken as a specimen, being like the last ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... blasphemers? Our reverence, after all, is given not to an Elizabethan named William Shakespeare, who was born at Stratford, and married, and migrated to London, and became a second-rate actor, and afterwards returned to Stratford, and made a will, and composed a few lines of doggerel for the tombstone under which he was buried. Our reverence is given to the writer of certain plays and sonnets. To that second-rate actor, because we believe he wrote those plays and sonnets, we give that reverence. But our belief is not ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... the anthologies of all the world besides. That 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 of ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... 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 matches ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... stanzas appear as 'Argomento' without mention of Mercury, while for the above lines are substituted the astonishing doggerel: ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... cried, smiting one palm with the fist of the other hand. "By God, sir, I would, if they were three and twenty." I had completely lost my temper. "And if I saw them doing nothing, while the country was asking for MEN, but writing rotten doggerel and messing about with girls far beneath them in station, I should call them the ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... not—intended, before I saw ground for abstaining, to have, as the phrase is, come in somehow. I think I could manage to bring anything into anything: certainly into a Budget of Paradoxes. Sir W. H. rather piqued himself upon some caniculars, or doggerel verses, which he had put together in memoriam [technicam] of the way in which A E I O are used in logic: he added U, Y, for the addition of meet, etc., to the system. I took the liberty of concocting some counter-doggerel, just to show that a ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... 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
... 'tis given, and then declare, Mean though I am, if it be worth my care. Is it not given to Este's unmeaning dash, To Topham's fustian, Reynold's flippant trash, To Andrews' doggerel where three wits combine, To Morton's catchword, Greathead's idiot line, And Holcroft's Shug-lane cant and Merry's ...
— English Satires • Various
... 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 all 'magic ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... questioning 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 ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... off both his feet) was met thirty years afterwards by the individual who was first saved in the Cambria. This man was wheeling himself in a go-cart on the race-ground at Lanark, dressed in sailor's costume, and selling papers with a picture of the Kent upon them and some doggerel verses below. As honorary secretary of the "Open-Air Mission" (which provides preachers for streets in towns, and for races and fairs in the country), the "first saved" from the wreck and burning then preached the Gospel to the "last saved" from the scorched embers, and to a large and motley ...
— The Loss of the Kent, East Indiaman, in the Bay of Biscay - Narrated in a Letter to a Friend • Duncan McGregor
... 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 foolish words were a bracer ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... solemn music of the Prayer-book of Edward VI. The translations of the Bible made no great advance on Wiclif. In the realm of verse, John Skelton was a powerful satirist with a unique manipulation of doggerel which has permanently associated a particular type of rhyme with his name; an original and versatile writer was Skelton, but without that new critical sense of style which was to become so marked a feature of the great literary outburst under Elizabeth. Herein, two minor poets alone, Surrey and ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... 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
... translation when a song or operatic excerpt of foreign origin is rendered in English. Of grand opera even the Daily Telegraph is moved to say that "the translations are in most cases literary nightmares." Mere baldness might be excused, and even doggerel overlooked, but one has only to turn to almost any of the current standard translations of foreign songs to see that the matter is worse than this. To expect a student to get up and participate in this verbal foolishness and ineptitude, ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... 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
... 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 ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... literary merit as to evoke the surprise of posterity at the ephemeral success which they unquestionably achieved. An instance in point is the celebrated poem "Lillibullero," or, as it is sometimes written, "Lilli Burlero." Here is the final stanza of the pitiful doggerel with which Wharton boasted that he had "sung a king out of ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... The doggerel, gotten up on the spur of the moment, struck the fancy of fully a score of boys, big and little, and in an instant all were singing it over and over again, at the top of their lungs, and at this those who did not ...
— The Rover Boys In The Mountains • Arthur M. Winfield
... 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
... tuneful name of Horbling Incites to further doggerel warbling, And Gallions, Goonbell, Gamlingay Are each deserving of a lay, No railway bard is worth his salt Who cannot bear to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 16, 1916 • Various
... poetry. The improvement in this department of literature within the past twenty-five years has been marked. There is still, indeed, in many hymnals, and especially in hymnals for Sunday schools and social meetings, much doggerel; but large recent contributions of hymns which are true poetry, many of the best of them from American sources, have made it possible to furnish our congregations with admirable ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... 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," and posted in its cars, for the ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... 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 ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... "The Bon Gaultier Ballads," and of "Firmilian," the scourge of the Spasmodic School. Mr. Aytoun has adorned the margins with notes and with caricatures of skulls and cross-bones, while the fly-leaves bear a sonnet to the author, and a lyric in doggerel. Surely this is, indeed, a literary curiosity. The sonnet ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... sanctity. Consider, then, what a man he must be, who hath all nine of them and in whom there is neither worth nor wit nor sanctity.' Being questioned whiles what were these nine defaults and having put them into doggerel rhyme, he would answer, 'I will tell you. He's a liar, a sloven, a slugabed; disobedient, neglectful, ill bred; o'erweening, foul-spoken, a dunderhead; beside which he hath divers other peccadilloes, whereof it booteth not to speak. But what is most laughable of all his fashions ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... is habitually 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 ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... a dollar," 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
... the Tooth-ache.—The following doggerel, to be written on a piece of parchment, and worn round the neck next to ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 63, January 11, 1851 • Various
... face, but, in truth, felt scarcely more sorrowful than a mute at a funeral. These first passions of men and women are mostly abortive; and are dead almost before they are born. Esmond could repeat, to his last day, some of the doggerel lines in which his muse bewailed his pretty lass; not without shame to remember how bad the verses were, and how good he thought them; how false the grief, and yet how he was rather proud of it. 'Tis an error, surely, to talk of ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Jefferson—actor, 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 it ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... spoke little, but Tree had discovered that under his placid exterior he concealed a vein of limitless vanity. One evening "Mr. Smith" startled the club by breaking his habitual silence, and bursting into poetry. Apropos of nothing at all, he suddenly declaimed two lines of doggerel, which, as far as my memory goes, ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... 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, circumstances have since rendered so glorious ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... to Kinmont Willie, I merely give such reasons as I can find for thinking that Scott HAD "mangled" fragments of an old ballad before him, and did not merely paraphrase the narrative of Walter Scott of Satchells, in his doggerel True History of the Name of ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... 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
... 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
... 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
... inheritance of man; from 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 thy music, will ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... for three years' extravagant expenditure; all these mixed up together in a dusty old violin-case lined with ruby velvet. I found besides a large account-book, which, when opened, hopefully turned out to my infinite consternation to be filled with verses—page after page of rhymed doggerel of a jovial and improper character, written in the neatest minute hand I ever did see. In the same fiddle-case a photograph of my predecessor, taken lately in Saigon, represented in front of a garden view, and in company of a female in strange ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... 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 carnival. One of the most popular during ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... 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
... 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
... grief, And yet we must thank it for sending At times unexpected relief; These boons are not felt in the trenches Or make our home burdens less hard; They're not a bonanza, but merit a stanza Or two from the doggerel bard. ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 16, 1914 • Various
... a mere pin- point in the universe, there were 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 ...
— When William Came • Saki
... half articulate. Words and music have lost each other and new and cant phrases of a dimly understood theology have displaced the older sentiment. Once in a while we catch a strange word of an unknown tongue, as the "Mighty Myo," which figures as a river of death; more often slight words or mere doggerel are joined to music of singular sweetness. Purely secular songs are few in number, partly because many of them were turned into hymns by a change of words, partly because the frolics were seldom heard by the stranger, ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... 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 ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... 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. Kipling's illness, setting ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... as blue as the usual state of Mr. 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 ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... of 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 ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... then after he is gone, will be enrolled among us. The public insist on being admitted to his history, and their curiosity will not go unsatisfied. [Cheers.] His letters are hunted up, his journals are sifted; his sayings in conversation, the doggerel which he writes to his brothers and sisters are collected, and stereotyped in print. [Laughter.] His fate overtakes him. He cannot escape from it. We cry out, but it does not appear that men sincerely resist the liberty ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... edition of Henry Crabb Robinson's Diary was in better case than he who had bothered himself to obtain a first. When it fell in with his mood to argue against that which he himself most affected, he would quote the childish bit of doggerel beginning 'The first the worst, the second the same,' and then grow eloquent over the dainty Templeman Hazlitts which are chiefly third editions. He thought it absurd to worry over a first issue ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... narrow for him; that was as far as he could get unaided; and it was as much as I could bear to see of a feat which in itself might have hardened my conscience and softened my heart. But I had identified his doggerel verse at last. I am ashamed to say that it was part of a set of my very own writing in the school magazine of my time. So Raffles knew the stuff better than I did myself, and yet scorned to press his flattery to win me over! He had won me: in a second my rounded shoulders ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... The Coventry workhouse 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 was an important stronghold after ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... only indicated by an N. The nasal whine of a suppliant for alms, begging, as Erasmus begged, not in the name of charity, but of learning, makes itself heard both in the rhyme and rhythm of the original Latin. I have tried to follow the sing-song doggerel. ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... 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
... A prominent character in Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais. Hertrippa is a magician who gives Panurge advice on the subject of marriage. Bluphocks is simply racking his brain for words to rhyme with "Pippa," so that he may write doggerel poetry to or about her. For "King Agrippa" ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... down 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 fellow just ...
— The Rover Boys at College • Edward Stratemeyer
... moon. One day, after a repetition of her original contumely, he appeared before his nurse in a violent rage, and complained vehemently of the old lady, declaring that he could not bear the sight of her, and then he broke out into the following doggerel, which he repeated over and over, crowing ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... 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 Paul, the son of Catharine, ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... 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 ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... 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 ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... filled on service-days with eager worshipers. Here she gave exhortations, and prophesied in a species of religious frenzy or convulsion, sometimes uttering very heavy prose, and sometimes the most fearful doggerel rhyme resembling—well—perhaps our album effusions here at home! Indeed, I can think of nothing else equally fearful. In these paroxysms, Joanna raved like an ancient Pythoness whirling on her tripod, and to just about the same purpose. Yet, it was astonishing to see how the thing went ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... "The same things do not charm everybody," said she. "It seemed to me no better than that Methodist doggerel. The latter half, at least; the ...
— Out in the Forty-Five - Duncan Keith's Vow • Emily Sarah Holt
... 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
... working-men, like the people called their betters, do not always understand their own interests, and will often actually help their oppressors to exterminate their saviours to the tune of 'Rule Britannia,' or some such lying doggerel. We must educate them out of that, and, meanwhile, push forward the international association of laborers diligently. I am at present occupied in propagating its principles. Capitalism, organized for repressive purposes under pretext of governing ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... 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
... won't care! Won't it be nice to get rid of these frail, troublesome bodies of ours, and live without them! I hope I shall see you in heaven, with plenty of room and no rheumatism. How could you make such a time over that doggerel! [12] Such things are a drug in this house. I thought I had a long letter from you, and it was that stuff! My last book is all printed. My husband kindly corrected the proof-sheets for me; a thing I hate to do. He likes the book ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... 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 members ...
— Mingo - And Other Sketches in Black and White • Joel Chandler Harris
... 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
... rondo, 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, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... place to a sort of doggerel English, but they have never learned to speak the language of the country except in some of the ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... 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 of ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... 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
... their heads bowed on their knees. Right alongside of me, so near that when he tossed his arms about he struck me on the shoulder, Silas Dunlap was dying. He had been shot in the head in the first attack, and all the second day was out of his head and raving and singing doggerel. One of his songs, that he sang over and over, until it made mother frantic ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... Gives thee his little doggerel lay;—One truth I tell, in sorrow tell it: I'm forced to give my verse away, Because, ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... 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 paper, and ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... 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
... and pretentious. Look at your father and his poems; he thinks his doggerel verses a ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... lay in bed late in the morning and stole sugar. This incident led to several pamphlets. In The Presbyterian, Lash or Noctroff's Maid Whipt (1661), a satire on Crofton, we read: "It is not only contrary to Gospel but good manners to take up a wench's petticoats, smock and all"; and in the doggerel ballad of "Bo-Peep," which was also written on the same subject, it is said that Crofton should have left his wife to chastise the maid. Crofton published two pamphlets, one under his own name and one ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... better able to bear them. The motions of the Californian females of all classes in the dance are highly graceful. The waltz is their favourite measure, and in this they appear to excel as much as the men do in horsemanship. During the progress of the dance, the males and females improvise doggerel rhymes complimentary of the personal beauties and graces of those whom they admire, or expressive of their love and devotion, which are chanted with the music of the instruments, and the whole company join in the general chorus at the end of each verse. The din of voices ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant
... gallery rising from the same level up behind the pulpit. There the boys of the free school also could be under the master's eye, and with instruments of music like those of King David, but now banished from even village churches, would accompany him in the doggerel strains of Sternhold and Hopkins, immortalised by Cowper. To the far right the boys could see and long for the ropes under the tower, in which the bell-ringers of his day, as of Bunyan's not long before, delighted. The preaching of the time did nothing more for young ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... presented by the language, which has not nearly the same amount of vowel terminations, nor of simple uniform vowel sounds, as the Spanish; the double termination, however full of grace and beauty in the Castilian, assumes, perhaps from the effect of association, rather a doggerel air in the English. ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... 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 either ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... sight was somewhat ludicrous, and Mr. Gilchrist sought to 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 ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... 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 year of our Lord the thousandth, four ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... the last stages of alcoholism and mental depression brought it in yesterday. It's an idiotic jumble about Beautiful Women of History, part in prose and part in doggerel." ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... 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 and Daniel ...
— Dorothy's House Party • Evelyn Raymond
... croaked forth the following doggerel (the most acceptable poetry, by the way, of the city), in which the titles of the songs were dragged in, without any regard to order, to make up ...
— The Adventures of a Bear - And a Great Bear too • Alfred Elwes
... 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 ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... as it was 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 ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... used to rattle off for my special delectation a doggerel ballad of his own composition. The hero was myself and there was a glowing anticipation of the arrival of a heroine. And as I listened my interest would wax intense at the picture of this world-charming bride ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... his head, like a French clown, and with a horn in his hand he made as much noise, and played as many antics, as any fool in the crowd. Though the tailor could not read, he usually composed the verses for the Charivari; and the doggerel of the father, mysteriously fructified, afterwards became the seed of poetry in ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... 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 cold rations of ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... 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 it ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... 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 ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... 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 ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... who could not hear the call of duty and whose consciences will grow more flabby every day. With the brutal roar of the first Prussian gun the cry came to the civilised world, "Follow thou me," just as truly as it did in Palestine. Men went to their Calvary singing Tipperary, rubbish, rhymed doggerel, but their spirit was equal to that of any Christian martyr in a Roman amphitheatre. "Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friend." Our chaps are doing that consciously, willingly, ...
— Carry On • Coningsby Dawson
... 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 Book" ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... doggerel start up in the mind like that? Wanda! The weed-flower become so rare he would not be parted from her! The fire, the candles, and the fire—no ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... whereupon the 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 heroes whom ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... 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. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various
... 'Polyhorus tharus'. In relation to the word 'tharus', which figures as a sort of scientific (or doggerel) cognomen to this bird, Mr. W. H. Hudson once pointed out to me that, like some other 'scientific facts', it originated in a mistake. The Pampa Indian name of the bird is 'trare'. Molina (Don Juan Ignacio), ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... 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 ...
— The Way of Salvation in the Lutheran Church • G. H. Gerberding
... 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
... 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 ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... never taken office, and had never been "one of them." And at the end he was to be buried in the Chancel, the select spot for nobles and prelates and "great men." Verily the tongues of the gossips of Stratford would wag on April 25, 1616. The authorship of the doggerel lines on his tomb has been attributed to various people. Probably they were a part of the stock-in-trade of the stone-cutter, that satisfied Shakespeare's widow as expressing a known wish of her "dear departed." Rude as they are, they have fulfilled ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes
... theme of inspiration for innumerable sermons and a prodigious quantity of doggerel. Among the ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... (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
... 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 chorus ...
— Massacres Of The South (1551-1815) - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... 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, ...
— The Triple Alliance • Harold Avery
... this doggerel in a rough, loud contralto, when her chamberlain appeared at the door, and announced that his royal highness was waiting ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... to accept the 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, ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... 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 ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... 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 marvellously ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... he thought moodily, "how long they will go on intoning their dreary Latin doggerel? Priestcraft and Sham! There's no escape from it anywhere, not even in the wilds of Caucasus! I wonder if the man I seek is really here, or whether after all I have been misled? There are so many contradictory stories told about him that one doesn't know what to believe. It seems ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... sight, seem to love to revel in the beautiful visions presented by the imagination. Among blind poets and rhymesters there are, of course, as many different grades of merit as among the more favored writers, but the proportion of doggerel writers is fortunately much smaller among the blind, and they cannot so readily inflict their scribbling in such volume on a patient public. The poems here presented are selected from among a number of the best productions ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms |
