"Doggerel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... led to several pamphlets. In The Presbyterian, Lash or Noctroff's Maid Whipt (1661), a satire on Crofton, we read: "It is not only contrary to Gospel but good manners to take up a wench's petticoats, smock and all"; and in the doggerel ballad of "Bo-Peep," which was also written on the same subject, it is said that Crofton should have left his wife to chastise the maid. Crofton published two pamphlets, one under his own name and one under that of ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... imagination and such total absence of 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 ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... required of him. Eight lines only were sufficient if the task was completed on time, but the time was up and no line was written. This meant being kept after school to write twelve lines. In this extremity. Jay Gould came to his rescue with the following doggerel:— ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... balayeuse at the bottom of a lady's dress; but, like the balayeuse, it is only meant to be a protection and a finish, and, however precious it may be, it suffers from contact with the dirt, and sooner or later has to be cut out and cast aside, soiled and useless. Some doggerel a friend of mine scribbled on one book in particular describes ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... humor, wished that the author of the Biglow Papers "could have used good English." In the lines just quoted, indeed, the bad English adds nothing to the effect. In 1848 Lowell wrote A Fable for Critics, something after the style of Sir John Suckling's Session of the Poets; a piece of rollicking doggerel in which he surveyed the American Parnassus, scattering about headlong fun, sharp satire and sound criticism in equal proportion. Never an industrious workman, like Longfellow, at the poetic craft, but preferring to wait for the mood to seize him, he allowed eighteen years ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... down to the cockpit, 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 Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... 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 love with that last one, particularly, hearing his rendition of it. ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... not very treacherous, amidst that roar was loudly distinguishable the voice of him who on an after day, yet to be spoken of, cursed from God's altar those who wished to realise his simulated aspirations and in the endeavour had forfeited their lives. A doggerel ballad had been written for the occasion by Thomas Davis, to the air of the "Gallant Tipperary," over which himself and his friends afterwards indulged in many a hearty laugh. ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... send out a book full of thought and feeling which, whatever they may be worth, are his own, without a parental anxiety in regard to the fate of his offspring. And there are few prefaces which do not in some way betray this nervousness. I confess to a respect for even the prefatory doggerel of good Tinker Bunyan—a respect for his paternal tenderness toward his book, not at all for his villainous rhyming. When I saw, the other day, the white handkerchiefs of my children waving an adieu as they sailed away from me, a profound anxiety seized me. So now, as I part company with August ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... were a species of ground game—never failed to thrill her with enjoyable disgust. She knew a great portion of the Methodist hymn-book by heart, and pondered long over the interesting preface to that work, wondering much what "doggerel" and "botches" could be—she inclined to the supposition that the former were animals and the latter were diseases; but even her vivid imagination failed to form a satisfactory representation of such queer kittle-cattle as "feeble expletives." Every Sunday she ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... the thoughts that buzzed round inside her head, as the mosquitoes buzzed outside.—And meanwhile the familiar, foolish noises of the garden at evening knocked at her ear. On the other side of the hedge a batch of third-form girls were whispering, with choked laughter, a doggerel rhyme which was hard to say, and which meant something quite different did the tongue trip over a certain letter. Of two girls who were playing tennis in half-hearted fashion, the one next Laura said 'Oh, damn!' every time she missed a ball. And over the parched, ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... under some delusion as to the merits of Lord B.'s poetry, and treat the wretched verses, the Fare Well, with far too much respect. They are disgusting in sentiment, and in execution contemptible. 'Though my many faults deface me,' etc. Can worse doggerel than such a stanza be written? One verse is commendable: 'All my madness none can know.'" The criticism, as criticism, confutes itself, and is worth quoting solely because it displays the feeling of a sane and honourable ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... pretty near being books of poetry. The improvement in this department of literature within the past twenty-five years has been marked. There is still, indeed, in many hymnals, and especially in hymnals for Sunday schools and social meetings, much doggerel; but large recent contributions of hymns which are true poetry, many of the best of them from American sources, have made it possible to furnish our congregations with ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... perhaps as a sample of the Friedrich manufacture, surely not otherwise! There remains yet more than half of it; readers see what their foolish craving has brought upon them! Doggerel out of which no clear story, such story as there is, can be had; though, except the exaggeration and contortion, there is nothing of fiction in it. We fly to the Newspaper, happily at least a prose composition, which begins at this point; and ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... floriated spandrels.[44] We should like to pursue the subject of these Newbury clothiers and see Thomas Dolman's house, which is so fine and large and cost so much money that his workpeople used to sing a doggerel ditty:— ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... branding I dare not attempt to describe; Some themes are too high and outstanding For bards of the doggerel tribe; But patriot minstrels will ladle Out lauds on the parents who see That the Celt is tattooed in his ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 14, 1919 • Various
... night one of the two was going to raise the veil of the future, and the other the following night. As the clock began striking twelve the fellow-servant began striking the floor with a strap, repeating the doggerel lines ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... 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 the end ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... during the night; the companies had scoured the streets singing some doggerel, which one of the bloody wretches, being in poetic vein, had composed, ...
— Massacres Of The South (1551-1815) - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... 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 all 'magic formulae,' ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... them down as knavish blasphemers? Our reverence, after all, is given not to an Elizabethan named William Shakespeare, who was born at Stratford, and married, and migrated to London, and became a second-rate actor, and afterwards returned to Stratford, and made a will, and composed a few lines of doggerel for the tombstone under which he was buried. Our reverence is given to the writer of certain plays and sonnets. To that second-rate actor, because we believe he wrote those plays and sonnets, we give that reverence. ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... 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
... fall short at present of the Ancients in Poetry, Painting, Oratory, History, Architecture, and all the noble Arts and Sciences which depend more upon Genius than Experience, we exceed them as much in Doggerel, Humour, Burlesque, and all the trivial Arts of Ridicule. We meet with more Raillery among the Moderns, but more Good ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... represented the very best narrative poetry of the greatest poet of his day. D'Urfey's 'Tales', on the other hand, published in 1704 and 1706, were collections of dull and obscene doggerel by a ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... that doggerel, 'A Noble Personality,' is the most utter trash possible, and it couldn't have been ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... the 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
... bounds. Her studio was simply besieged by "the Quality." The Duchess of Orleans had to wait her turn a whole year before she could be painted. Vigee Le Brun's praise was in every mouth. She was sung in prose and verse; the poetasters ran to much doggerel of handsome intent, as was the fashion of the day. Marquises and the rest of the scribbling folk tripped over halting feet to sing her charms and immortalise her art. "L'orgueil de France" rhymed it to "la ...
— Vigee Le Brun • Haldane MacFall
... the outward material with which he worked that John Bunyan had much in common with the romance and poetry of England. He could indeed write verses which, for sheer doggerel, it would be difficult to match, but in spite of that there was the authentic note of poetry in him. Some of his work is not only vigorous, inspiring, and full of the brisk sense of action, but has an unconscious strength and worthiness of style, ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... found to believe in this doggerel—especially frightened were the Irish in London, and the lower classes generally. There was a great exodus of the former, some even listening to the entreaties of their friends, and returning to Ireland, and many of the latter moved eastward of ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... 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, ...
— History of the United States, Vol. I (of VI) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... 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 ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... sufficient taste in their interior economy to prove that a refined intellect had projected them; and had projected a Vandalism, only because fancy had been followed instead of judgment; with as much nonchalance as is evinced by a perfect poet, who is extemporizing doggerel for a baby; full of brilliant points, which he cannot help, and jumbled into confusion, for which he ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... these doggerel lines excited Jack Vance's wrath above measure, the last verse especially raising his anger to boiling-point, so that it fairly bubbled over. Jack was a loyal-hearted youngster; he was nothing to Allingford, but Allingford was ...
— The Triple Alliance • Harold Avery
... of my works. Here is an article on the writings of Victor Hugo, another on an American book called "Confessions of a Poet," a whole heap of verses, among which sundry doggerel epistles to you; and last, not least, the present voluminous ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... size or kind I should publish. Who could have thought that so many years would elapse, without my giving the least signs of life upon the subject of this important promise? Who could have imagined that a volume of doggerel, after all, would be the first offering that Gratitude would lay upon the shrine ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... of whom know nothing of India, except that it occupies a certain space in the map of the world, these notes were absolutely necessary to understand the work. Finally, as I am no poet, and have a most thorough contempt for the maker of mere doggerel rhymes, I have translated the pieces of poetry, which are interspersed in the original, into ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli
... a second edition of Henry Crabb Robinson's Diary was in better case than he who had bothered himself to obtain a first. When it fell in with his mood to argue against that which he himself most affected, he would quote the childish bit of doggerel beginning 'The first the worst, the second the same,' and then grow eloquent over the dainty Templeman Hazlitts which are chiefly third editions. He thought it absurd to worry over a first issue of Carlyle's French Revolution ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... wits had their time of it. They showered in caricatures and doggerel by the barrel. None enjoyed these more than the doctor himself. By his direction the funniest of the cartoons were pasted against the wall of the gallery in which the doctor slept and the watchers sat. Above the whole was the legend in German text, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... Lewis and Clarke's "Tour," and author of "Noah"; Dr. Readel, "a fellow of infinite jest"; Brackenridge, author of "Views in Louisiana," and "History of the War"; Dennison, an Englishman, who wrote clever doggerel; and, at different times, two or three more, not worth mentioning, even if I remembered their names—we passed every Saturday evening, after the club was established, until it was broken up by President Watkins's going to Washington, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... at 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 ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... 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
... these 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
... 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)
... thy dominions. No, grandson of Chronos. Death is the 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 ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... gained 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, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... 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 English and her ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... and so the doggerel went on, chronicling the details (more or less imaginary) of the fight, the entrance of Mr. Benbow ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... written language offering unlimited facilities for the formation of the latter. Chinese riddles, by which term we include conundrums, charades, et hoc genus omne, are similar to our own, and occupy quite as large a space in the literature of the country. They are generally in doggerel, of which the following may be taken as a specimen, being like the last ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... certain restless and 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 ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... 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
... noteworthy example of that invincible activity which led him to take personal cognizance of every region in his Empire: "Ante omnes enitebatur ne quid otiosum vel emeret aliquando vel pasceret." His contempt for slothful self-indulgence finds vent in his reply to the doggerel verses ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... proceedings, extracts from sermons, a bit 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 ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... 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 ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... the "Skeletons," and the talk among them was of the trial of the Sharkeys, which had taken place the day before. "They've 'ed six menths," said one. "And it's all along o' minjee parsons," said another; and Charlie Wilkes, who had a certain reputation for humour, did a step-dance and sang some doggerel beginning— ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... recognize the Countess de Vassart are doubtless in error. Mornac, long dead, is safe in his disguise; Tric-Trac was executed on the Place de la Roquette, and celebrated in doggerel by an unspeakable ballad writer. There remains Scarlett; dead or alive, ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... 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 ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... never received; and Evelyn might have had the honour of knighthood of the Bath, but declined it. He was present at the Coronation in Westminster Abbey on St. George's Day, 1661, and had prepared and printed a Panegyric poem on the occasion, a screed of bombastic doggerel in fulsome praise of the King. He was a frequent visitor at the Court, and loved to sun himself in the royal presence. One of the finest examples of this feature of Evelyn's character is his Fumifugium, published in 1661, which will be more particularly referred ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... plainly assonates, rather than rimes, with "glorious," but this is dangerously close to doggerel. Assonance is unsuited to the genius of any language possessed of a rich vowel-system. This is evident to any one who has read Archbishop Trench's attempt to render Calderon's ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... 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 ...
— Patty Fairfield • Carolyn Wells
... Flat.—This correspondent sends a lot of doggerel, and says it has been regarded as very good in Dutch Flat. I give a ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... some poetry, or rather doggerel," said Mr. Harry, "that I cutout of a newspaper for you yesterday;" and he drew from his pocket a little slip of paper, and ...
— Beautiful Joe - An Autobiography of a Dog • by Marshall Saunders
... lived. He had been, I imagine, an itinerant doctor, for there was no town in England, or country in Europe, of which he could not give a very particular account. He had some letters, and was ingenious, but much of an unbeliever, and wickedly undertook, some years after, to travesty the Bible in doggerel verse, as Cotton had done Virgil. By this means he set many of the facts in a very ridiculous light, and might have hurt weak minds if his work had been published; but it ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... muy mala e corrupta letra), apparently in abbreviations (sin ortografia), that Las Casas says he found extreme difficulty in making it out. Now let us observe that date, which is given in fantastic style, apparently because the inscription is in a rude doggerel, and the writer seems to have wished to keep his "verses" tolerably even. (They don't scan much better than Walt Whitman's.) As it stands, the date reads anno domini millesimo quatercentessimo octiesque ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... using all sorts of quaint and babyish words and strange strings of capital letters, M. D., for instance, meaning my dears, M. E., Madam Elderly, or D. D., Dear Dingley, and so on. Throughout, too, we come on little bits of doggerel rimes, bad puns, simple jokes, mixed up with scraps of politics, with threatenings of war, with party quarrels, with all kinds of stray fragments of news which bring the life of the times vividly before us. The letters were never meant for any one but Stella and Mistress Dingley to see, and ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... had paused here, and was looking through some printed slips in his pocket-book. "I wanted you to see some of the fellow's articles in print, but I have nothing of importance here—only some of his 'doggerel,' as he calls it, and you've had a sample of that. But here's a bit of the upper spirit of the man—and still another that you should hear him recite. You can keep them both if you care to. The boys all fell in love with that last one, particularly, hearing his rendition ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... 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
... the poetry," replied my father; "no doubt it seems to you poor, silly doggerel; but I have no doubt of this, Roger, your interest and mine lie in ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... pious and unexceptionable doggerel and no one would admit such fact more quickly than Mistress Anne herself, who laid it away in after days in her drawer, with a smile at the metre and a sigh for the miserable time it chronicled. There were many of them, for among the ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... blemish which diminished his beauty. Banished by his rival, he ran to meet death in 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
... ice were amongst the most trying moments of our life in the North; and from the composition of our squadron, namely, two fast vessels, and two slow ones, the constant waiting for one another put me much in mind of the old doggerel:— ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... 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 ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... 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
... an 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
... 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 a parental ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... 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
... personality, which his philosophical dejection never quenched, is everywhere in evidence. It is clear that he did not set himself to master the poet's art, yet through the mask of conventional verse which often falls into doggerel, the voice of a true poet is heard. In selecting the pieces for this volume I have put in the vigorous sea verses of John Marr in their entirety and added those others from his Battle Pieces, Timoleon, etc., that best indicate the quality of their author's personality. The prose supplement ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... he did his "sums" in the sand on the ground, or on a wooden shovel which, after it was covered on both sides, he scraped down so as to erase the work. A note-book is preserved, containing, along with examples in arithmetic, this boyish doggerel: ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... doggerel rhymes are not quite representative of the book, as the well-known "Three children sliding on the ice upon a summer's day" appears herein. The "cuts" are distinctively notable, especially the Crocodile (which contradicts the letterpress, ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... Ingenuity at lifting the dull monotony of imprisonment brought to light many talents for camaraderie which amused not only the suffrage prisoners but the "regulars." Locked in separate cells, as in the District Jail, the suffragists could still communicate by song. The following lively doggerel to the tune of "Captain Kidd" was sung in chorus to the accompaniment of a hair comb. It became a saga. Each day a new verse was added, relating the day's particular controversy with ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... 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 ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... versions of the Psalms often inclined to doggerel, and though they probably had little, if any, influence on the Authorized Version, they made their own claims to accuracy, and even after the appearance of the King James Bible sometimes demanded attention as ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... 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
... old James the First graveyard near Peat's Hill may spell out this bit of doggerel, undoubtedly one of the worst recorded of an Elizabethan, on ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... modern Polish biographers often heard in his youth a song purporting to be Kosciuszko's composition, with the tradition that he had composed it to his guitar—he played both the guitar and the violin—on the arrival of Polish visitors.[1] The doggerel, kindly little verses, express the hope that everything his compatriots see in his modest house will be as agreeable to them as their company is to their host, and inform them that he raised its walls with the ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... all her heart and soul; and she flew now through the starlit, sultry night, crying, "La guerre! La guerre! La guerre!" and chanting to the enraptured soldiery a "Marseillaise" of her own improvisation, all slang, and doggerel, and barrack grammar; but fire-giving as a torch, and rousing as a bugle in the way she sang it, waving the tricolor high over ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... and the constable's kind manner, and listening to the doggerel rhyme, and feeling that nettle would get her deserts, the little thing soon ceased crying. But several groups had been drawn towards the place, and amongst the rest came Miss Winter and her cousin, who had been within hearing of the disaster. The constable began to feel very nervous ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... The doggerel, gotten up on the spur of the moment, struck the fancy of fully a score of boys, big and little, and in an instant all were singing it over and over again, at the top of their lungs, and at this those who did not sing began to ...
— The Rover Boys In The Mountains • Arthur M. Winfield
... memory. I drifted—a demented man. I found myself in a house of kindly people, who had found me on the third day wandering, weeping, and raving through the streets of St. John's Wood. They have told me since that I was singing some insane doggerel about "The Last Man Left Alive! Hurrah! The Last Man Left Alive!" Troubled as they were with their own affairs, these people, whose name, much as I would like to express my gratitude to them, I may not even give here, nevertheless cumbered themselves with me, sheltered ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... described in the metrical history of Rouen, composed by a minstrel ycleped Poirier, the limper. This little tract is a chap-book at Rouen: most towns, in the north of France and Belgium, possess such chronicle ballads in doggerel rhyme, which are much read, and eke chaunted, by ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... Jacobite fable composed many years after both actors in the scene were dead. The story may not be true, but Macaulay's reasons for rejecting it are not quite exact. Reports of Claverhouse's gallantry at Seneff were certainly current during his lifetime. It is mentioned, for example, in a copy of doggerel verses addressed to Claverhouse by some nameless admirer on New Year's Day 1683.[4] And there is yet more particular testimony, though, like the former, it is of that nature which a historian will always feel himself at liberty to reject if ...
— Claverhouse • Mowbray Morris
... 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 ...
— Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction • Anonymous
... Chronicles of Ricobaldo and Francis Pipin, Muratori (dissert. xxvi. tom. ii. p. 492) has translated this curious fact with the doggerel verses that accompanied the gift:— Ave decus orbis, ave! victus tibi destinor, ave! Currus ab Augusto Frederico Caesare justo. Vae Mediolanum! jam sentis spernere vanum Imperii vires, proprias tibi ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... change is ordained, and then, thin meagre Latin (the same for everybody), 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 “Poetæ Græci,” cut up by ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... Civil War. He was the author of many works of very unequal merit, of which the best known is Drunken Barnaby's Four Journeys, which records his pilgrimages through England in rhymed Latin (said by Southey to be the best of modern times), and doggerel English verse. The English Gentleman (1631) and English Gentlewoman are in a much more decorous strain. Other works are The Golden Fleece (1611) (poems), The Poet's Willow, A Strappado for the Devil (a satire), and ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... of sacred carols by country people continued, indeed, but the creative artistic impulse was lost. True carols after the Reformation tend to be doggerel, and no doubt many of the traditional pieces printed in such collections as Bramley and Stainer's[33]{37} are debased survivals from the Middle Ages, or perhaps new words written for old tunes. Such carols as "God rest you merry, gentlemen," have unspeakably delightful ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... below. Then I read aloud the first two stanzas of Old Pictures in Florence, and realised for the thousandth time the definiteness of Browning's poetry. This particular poem is a mixture of art and doggerel; but even the latter is interesting to lovers ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... spells. The cat, as was to be expected, was particularly good on anything that had 'cat' in it; he once catalogued all the principal catastrophes; while the dog, although a good student, had a fancy for writing doggerel. Many and many a time, when the enchanter and his wonderful animals were seated in their armchairs round a blazing fire, talking exactly as any three good friends might talk, a nose would flatten itself against the panes, and the three companions would see looking in at them ...
— The Firelight Fairy Book • Henry Beston
... would have the men and the women separated, as they were in the Primitive Church;[716] he would have a hearty congregational service. When it was seasonable to sing praise to God, they were to do it with the spirit and the understanding also; 'not in the miserable, scandalous doggerel of Sternhold and Hopkins, but in psalms and hymns which are both sense and poetry, such as would sooner provoke a critic to turn Christian than a Christian to turn critic;' they were to sing 'not lolling at their ease, or in the indecent posture of sitting, ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... 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 ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... snowy hills and house-roofs rosy with the glow of sunset, it was warm and southern by contrast. The four principal towns of West and North Bothnia are thus characterised in an old verse of Swedish doggerel: Umea, the fine; Pitea, the needle-making; Lulea, the lazy; and in Tornea, everybody ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... around the little room his eyes caught some writing on the wall. There were several bits of doggerel, one ...
— The Mystery at Putnam Hall - The School Chums' Strange Discovery • Arthur M. Winfield
... Luther and Knox between the democracy of sin under the first Adam and the democracy of grace under the second Adam or Christ. The levelling effect of these ideas, however, was unmistakably felt as in the doggerel of John Ball, the mad Wycliffite priest ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... enemy, the mercenaries, who had little stomach for fight without wages, accepted the passports proffered by Parma. They revenged themselves for the harsh treatment which they had received from Casimir and from the states-general, by singing, everywhere as they retreated, a doggerel ballad—half Flemish, half German—in which their wrongs were expressed ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... picked up a precarious livelihood on land of undistinguished ownership now found the land all enclosed and his immemorial privileges withdrawn without compensation. Naturally there was much dissatisfaction. A popular piece of doggerel declared that:— ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... of Cranmer found its perfection in the solemn music of the Prayer-book of Edward VI. The translations of the Bible made no great advance on Wiclif. In the realm of verse, John Skelton was a powerful satirist with a unique manipulation of doggerel which has permanently associated a particular type of rhyme with his name; an original and versatile writer was Skelton, but without that new critical sense of style which was to become so marked a feature of the great literary outburst under Elizabeth. Herein, two minor poets ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... last kind of Wit the double Rhymes, which are used in Doggerel Poetry, and generally applauded by ignorant Readers. If the Thought of the Couplet in such Compositions is good, the Rhyme adds [little [12]] to it; and if bad, it will not be in the Power of the Rhyme to recommend it. I am afraid that great Numbers of ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... 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
... 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 the result is certainly such an avoidance. Nevertheless both, and especially Wyatt, had ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... 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 White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and possibly no worse, than much of the adolescent doggerel that is so often preserved by fond parents to prove that their child early gave signs of poetic ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... such a fact is not that the poet should try to achieve this truest office of his art by means of doggerel, but that he should study how and where and why the beauty and the truth he has made manifest are wanting in universal interest, in human appeal. Leaving the drama out of the question, and the theatre which seems now to be seeking only the favor ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Grosart in Miscellanies of the Fuller Worthies Library, vol. i., 1870), and A brefe Comedy or Enterlude of Johan Baptystes preachynge in the Wyldernesse, &c. (Harl. Misc. vol. i.) were all written in 1538. His plays are doggerel, but he is a figure of some dramatic importance as the author of Kynge Johan (c. 1548), which marks the transition between the old morality play and the English historical drama. It does not appear to have directly influenced the creators of the chronicle histories. To the authors of the Troublesome ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... frantic with alarm—the boy had disgraced him, and even his own position seemed to be threatened when some wit adroitly accused the parent of writing the doggerel for ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... dramatic poetry, lyric poetry; opera; posy, anthology; disjecta membra poetae song [Lat.], ballad, lay; love song, drinking song, war song, sea song; lullaby; music &c 415; nursery rhymes. [Bad poetry] doggerel, Hudibrastic verse^, prose run mad; macaronics^; macaronic verse^, leonine verse; runes. canto, stanza, distich, verse, line, couplet, triplet, quatrain; strophe, antistrophe^. verse, rhyme, assonance, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... wisely abstained from denouncing the sacrifice of victims at the Temple of Heaven and at the Confucian Temple. But backed by Confucianism it denounces the slaughter for food of the ox which tills the soil. Some lines of doggerel to this effect, based upon the Buddhist doctrine of the transmigration of souls and put into the mouth of an ox, have been rendered ...
— Religions of Ancient China • Herbert A. Giles
... scholars, and all, in spite of the professor of modern 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 epithet returned ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... was there truer utterance in a certain range of idiosyncrasy than by this poet. Hardly a piece of his, large or small, but has "snap" and raciness. He puts in cantering rhyme (often doggerel) much cutting irony and idiomatic ear-cuffing of the kirk-deacons—drilygood-natured addresses to his cronies, (he certainly would not stop us if he were here this moment, from classing that "to the De'il" among them)—"to Mailie and her Lambs," "to auld Mare ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... different? The soldier is generally a believer in the doctrine of predestination in the abstract, and it is well he is so, for otherwise many soldiers would run away from battle. But as it is, he consoles himself with the theories of the old doggerel quartet, which ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... I am afraid you might have him flayed alive, while the poor fellow deserves nothing but laughter for his doggerel." And while this doggerel was secretly pressed by her bosom, she stole a look at L'Isle, and was surprised to see how little galled he seemed to be ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... 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 of ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... "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
... 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 ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... want to ask me," he exclaimed, sternly and loudly; "you want to ask me how I can be mad enough to believe in a doggerel prophecy uttered in an age of superstition to awe the most ignorant hearers. I answer" (at those words his voice sank suddenly to a whisper), "I answer, because Stephen Monkton himself stands there at this moment ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... 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 major ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... daughter once went to a children's ball dressed as a fairy. She was proud of being a fairy, and looked so nice that I put together the above nursery doggerel to please her, and in honour of the event, little thinking that she would soon leave this world. It might be considered better by some to remove this page, but as children like it I venture to let it ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... 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 tears. Mr. Bell sends me a specimen ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... 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," ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... by one of those strange freaks of the mind that make people do the most absurd things at the most sacred times—mourners laugh at funerals, and soldiers in the thick of battles long for puddings—he began to say over that old doggerel which he used to repeat when shivering on the spring-board over the cold waters of the ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... which he makes sweet music. Thus equipped, they call on the farmer, and inquire, "please, sir, do you want your trees worsled?" They then proceed to the orchard, and encircling one of the largest and best-bearing trees, chant in a low voice a certain doggerel rhyme; and this ended, all shout in chorus, with the exception of the trumpeter, who blows a loud blast. During the ceremony they rap the trees with their sticks. "Thus going from tree to tree, or group to group, they wassail the whole orchard; this finished, they proceed to the house of the ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... Montrose, who lay at Selkirk. At breakfast, on September 13, Montrose learned that Leslie was attacking. What followed is uncertain in its details. A so-called "contemporary ballad" is incredibly impossible in its anachronisms, and is modern. In this egregious doggerel we are told that a veteran who had fought at Solway Moss a century earlier, and at "cursed Dunbar" a few years later (or under Edward I.?), advised Leslie to make a turning movement behind Linglie Hill. This is not evidence. Though Leslie may have made such a movement, he describes his victory ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... Imperialists, in overwhelming force, thought to crush him at Rosbach. He put them to shameful rout; and then, instead of bonfires and Te Deums, mocked at them in doggerel rhymes of amazing indecency. While he was beating the French, the Austrians took Silesia from him. He marched to recover it, found them strongly posted at Leuthen, eighty thousand men against thirty thousand, and without hesitation resolved ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... has a more marked rhythm than prose, must be more intense in meaning and more concise in style than prose. People expect a 'marked rhythm' to imply something worth marking; if it fails to do so they are disappointed. They are displeased at the visible waste of a powerful instrument; they call it 'doggerel,' and rightly call it, for the metrical expression of full thought and eager feeling—the burst of metre—incident to high imagination, should not be wasted on petty matters which prose does as well,—which it ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... for the outing were quickly completed. With the Rover boys went their old school chums, "Songbird" Powell, who was always making up doggerel which he called poetry; Hans Mueller, already introduced, and Fred Garrison. The houseboat was a large one, and to make the trip more pleasant, the boys invited two ladies to go along, Mrs. Stanhope and Mrs. Laning. With Mrs. Stanhope came her only daughter, Dora, whom Dick Rover thought ...
— The Rover Boys on the Plains - The Mystery of Red Rock Ranch • Arthur Winfield
... what the little doggerel song referred. It is true Mercy had filched Aunt Alvirah's phrase and made it her own— and it applied to the poor child as well as to the rheumatic old woman. But it was a song of joy— a ...
— Ruth Fielding of the Red Mill • Alice B. Emerson
... choice upon this occasion had fallen upon the most famous of the old halls. Of the performance I remember a topical song which evoked enthusiastic applause. It was an incredibly stupid piece of doggerel about England's position in the world; and the shiny-faced exquisite who declaimed it strutted to and fro like a bantam cock at each fresh roar of applause from the heated house. When he used the word "fight" he waved an imaginary ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... music have nothing in common. In one way, that which is melodious in verse becomes doggerel in music, and meter is hardly of value. Sonnets in music become abominable. I have made many experiments for finding the affinity of language and music. The two things are diametrically opposed, unless music ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... 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 ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... just as that of the dance is shown in the finales. Haydn's adagios, at his best, speak with the deepest yet the simplest feeling. A fairly close analogy is that of Burns, who, with little natural inspiration, found inspiration in his native ballads, and often worked up the merest doggerel into artistic shapes of wondrous poignancy. Haydn's habitual temper was cheerful, and his music rattles along with a certain gaiety of gallop very far away from the mechanical grinding or pounding accents of the contrapuntalists. (I don't mean the ...
— Haydn • John F. Runciman
... out this doggerel in a rough, loud contralto, when her chamberlain appeared at the door, and announced that his royal highness was waiting for her ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... of her fortunes at the time; all the material power was his. Even doggerel verse (it is worth while to brood on the fact) denies a surviving pre-eminence to the potent moody, reverses the position between the driven and the driver. Poetry, however erratic, is less a servant of the bully Present, or pomlious Past, than History. The Muse ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... cranium—white sheet thrown over his shoulders—is seated astride the ladder, with his back where his face should be—they hoist him upon men's shoulders—and in his hands he carries a long brush, tongs, and poker. A sort of mock proclamation is then made in doggerel verse at the door of all the alehouses in the parish, or wapentake, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, Issue 353, January 24, 1829 • Various
... trouble enough with my own pupil's effusions. I leave him a bit of Latin composition, and what do I find but an endless doggerel ballad on What's his name?-who hid under his father's staircase as a beggar, eating the dogs' meat, while his afflicted family were searching for him in vain;-his ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... see Bart Hodge's daughter in the stories. I also read the Top-Notch Magazine, and I like it next to Tip Top. I like the adventure stories the best, but the athletic stories are good, also. I have a little doggerel here that I would like to see ...
— Owen Clancy's Happy Trail - or, The Motor Wizard in California • Burt L. Standish
... thoughts of me, I will convince it by marrying this fair stranger the first thing I do: I cannot doubt but to find a welcome, since she is a banished woman, without friends or protection; and especially, when she shall see how civilly you have handled her here, in your doggerel ballad: I will teach you to be a wit, sir; and so your humble servant.'—And leaving him almost wild with his fears, he went directly to Sylvia, where he told her his nephew was going to make up the match between himself ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... doggerel expresses the opposite sentiment, 'My son's my son till he gets him a wife; My daughter's my ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... patterns of dress, Alhambra and common Moorish ornament, Greek mouldings, common flamboyant traceries, common Corinthian and Ionic capitals, and such other work, lines of this declared kind (generally to be classed under the head of "doggerel ornamentation") may be seen in rich profusion; and they are necessarily the only kind of lines which can be felt or enjoyed by persons who have been educated without reference to natural forms; their instincts being blunt, and their eyes actually ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... the country, growing every moment more extreme and more improbable. While respectable newspapers thundered out their grave invectives, halfpenny broadsides, hawked through the streets of London, re-echoed in doggerel vulgarity the same sentiments and the same suspicions(*). At last the wildest ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey |
