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Updated: July 10, 2025
As true wit generally consists in this resemblance and congruity of ideas, false wit chiefly consists in the resemblance and congruity sometimes of single letters, as in anagrams, chronograms, lipograms, and acrostics; sometimes of syllables, as in echoes and doggrel rhymes; sometimes of words, as in puns and quibbles; and sometimes of whole sentences or poems, cast into the figures of eggs, axes, or altars; nay, some carry the notion of wit so far as to ascribe it even to external mimicry, and to look upon a man as an ingenious person that can resemble the tone, posture, or face of another.
In these dens were manufactured treasonable works of all classes and sizes, from halfpenny broadsides of doggrel verse up to massy quartos filled with Hebrew quotations. It was not safe to exhibit such publications openly on a counter. They were sold only by trusty agents, and in secret places.
"He is chaffing you, doctor," said Edward; "it is logic. He is coaching her; and then she will coach me." "Then I forbid the chaff-cutting, young Pidant. Logic is an ill plaster to a sore head." "Oh, 'the labour we delight in, physics pain." "Jinnyus, Jinnyus; Take care o' your carkuss," retorted the master of doggrel.
Fired by the immediate and instantly proverbial popularity of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, he hired, we may suppose, some ready hack of unclean hand to supply him with three doggrel sonnets on the same subject, noticeable only for their porcine quality of prurience: he procured by some means a rough copy or an incorrect transcript of two genuine and unpublished sonnets by Shakespeare, which with the acute instinct of a felonious tradesman he laid atop of his worthless wares by way of gilding to their base metal: he stole from the two years published text of Love's Labour's Lost, and reproduced with more or less mutilation or corruption, the sonnet of Longavile, the "canzonet" of Biron, and the far lovelier love-song of Dumaine.
And indeed Es Shihab el Hijazi has brought them all together in the following doggrel: Say to the face, 'Be bright, and to the skin, say, 'See, I show thee what befits thee best: 'tis purity. For elegance of shape the nose we chiefly prize, And languor soft it is, that best becomes the eyes.
A printer in the neighbourhood, disgusted with these and similar efforts of tyranny on the part of the dominant party, thrust a couple of lines of doggrel into the lottery: "In name of the Prince of Orange, I ask once and again, What difference between the Inquisition of Rotterdam and Spain?"
The dull moralizings of the rimers who followed Chaucer, the rough but vivacious doggrel of Skelton, made way in the hands of Wyatt and Surrey for delicate imitations of the songs, sonnets, and rondels of Italy and France.
For a large board had been nailed by the crown prince on the very front of our house, between the door and window, painted in cinnabar the pigment of the country with doggrel rhymes and contumelious pictures, and announcing, in terms unnecessarily figurative, that the trick was already played, the claim already jumped, and Master Sam the legitimate successor of Mr. Ronalds.
In England this calumny never found credit even with the vulgar, and is nowhere to be found even in the most ribald doggrel that was sung about our streets. In truth the Princess seems never to have been guilty of a thought inconsistent with her conjugal vows. To her Marlborough, with all his genius and his valour, his beauty and his grace, was nothing but the husband of her friend.
'Of course, said Lord Elphinstone, 'I don't remember any of it; but was very funny, and used to be repeated in society. Macaulay, who was sitting a good way off, immediately said: 'I remember being shaved by the fellow, and he recited a quantity of verse to me during the operation, and here is some of it; and then he went off in a very queer doggrel about the exploits of Bonaparte, of which I recollect the recurring refrain
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