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Perceval and Mr Canning . . . We shall now see if a nation is to be saved by school-boy jokes and doggrel rhymes, by affronting petulance, and by the tones and gesticulations of Mr. Pitt.
The killer ploughs 'a course, the healer 'feels his way." So mysterious are the operations of the human mind, that, when we have exploded in verse tuneful as the above, we lapse into triumph instead of penitence. Not that doggrel meets with reverence here below the statues to it are few, and not in marble, but in the material itself But then an Impromptu!
It was refuted in many keen pamphlets; it was turned into doggrel rhymes; and it was left undefended even by the boldest and most acrimonious libellers among the nonjurors.
Other people have invented book-plates, containing fell curses in doggrel Latin or the vernacular on the careless or dishonest borrower: "Aspice Pierrot pendut Parceque librum non a rendu" is the kind of macaronic French and Latin which schoolboys are accustomed to write under a sketch of the borrower expiating his offences on the gallows.
When the danger and anxiety were over, Emser had the effrontery to say of him in some popular doggrel, 'Now that he has lit the fire, he washes his hands like Pilate, and turns his cloak to the wind; and again, 'He himself cannot deny that he exhorted you to rebellion, and called all of you dear children of God, who gave up to it your lives and property, and washed your hands in blood.
A collection of wretched bouts-rimés and burlesque doggrel, written at Florence in a house which Mme. d'Albany could not enter, and in the company of women whom Mme. d'Albany could not receive, and among which is a sonnet in which Alfieri explains his condescension in joining in these poetical exercises of the demi-monde by an allusion to Hercules and Omphale, shows that Alfieri frequented in Florence other society besides that which crowded round his lady in Casa Gianfigliazzi.
The eight of diamonds celebrated the Company for the Colonization of Acadia, with this doggrel : He that is rich and wants to fool away A good round sum in North America, Let him subscribe himself a headlong sharer, And asses' ears shall honour him or bearer. And in a similar style every card of the pack exposed some knavish scheme, and ridiculed the persons who were its dupes.
Literally, "in consequence of its being traversed or walked over." I have translated into plain prose all the verses occurring in the original. I have not the vanity to think myself a poet; and I have a horror of seeing mere doggrel rhymes such as the following "Mighty toil I've borne for years thirty, I have revived Persia by this Pursi."
The copies of the school in England and Italy have all its faults and none of its beauties; in France, whatever it lost in method or in majesty, it gained in fantasy: literally Flamboyant, it breathed away its strength into the air; but there is not more difference between the commonest doggrel that ever broke prose into unintelligibility, and the burning mystery of Coleridge, or spirituality of Elizabeth Barrett, than there is between the dissolute dulness of English Flamboyant, and the flaming undulations of the wreathed lines of delicate stone, that confuse themselves with the clouds of every morning sky that brightens above the valley of the Seine.
The very doggrel of them, the total absence of any attempt at ornament in diction or polish in metre, is proof complete of their deep heart-wrung sincerity. They are like the wail of a lost child, rather than the remorse of a Titan. The heart of the man was so young to the last; the boy-vein in him, as perhaps in all great poets, beating on through manhood for good and for evil.
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