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Updated: November 10, 2025
But we question whether he was understood; whether, if that very flowery and magniloquent style which we now consider his great failing had been away, he would not have been passed over by the many as a writer of vulgar doggrel. True, the old simple ballad-muse of Scotland still dropped a gem from her treasures, here and there, even in the eighteenth century itself witness "Auld Robin Gray."
It would however be a more correct advice to the aspirant, to say, Be earnest in your application, but let your march be vigilant and slow. There is a doggrel couplet which I have met with in a book on elocution: Learn to speak slow: all other graces Will follow in their proper places. I could wish to recommend a similar process to the student in the course of his reading.
None of Hereward's deeds is told so carefully and lovingly; and none, doubt it not, was so often sung in after years by farm-house hearths, or in the outlaws' lodge, as this. Robin Hood himself may have trolled out many a time, in doggrel strain, how Hereward played the potter.
Instead therefore of following the lead of Terence's or the hint of Jonson's example, and exalting the accent of his comedy to the full-mouthed pitch of a Chremes or a Kitely, he strikes out some forty and odd lines of rather coarse and commonplace doggrel about brokers, proctors, lousy fox-eyed serjeants, blue and red noses, and so forth, to make room for the bright light interlude of fairyland child's-play which might not unfittingly have found place even within the moon-charmed circle of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
It was the famous ballad of the regulators that he heard, and it smote his heart with a consciousness of his personal danger that made him shiver in his shoes. The uncouth doggrel, recited in a lilting sort of measure, the peculiar and various pleasures of a canter upon a pine rail. It was clear that the mob were by no means satisfied with the small measure of sport which they had enjoyed.
Take away this one property of a fool, and the orator shall become as dumb and silent as the pulpit he stands in; the musician shall hang up his untouched instruments on the wall; the completest actors shall be hissed off the stage; the poet shall be burlesqued with his own doggrel rhymes; the painter shall himself vanish into an imaginary landscape; and the physician shall want food more than his patients do physic.
No report of the debates has been preserved, unless a long forgotten lampoon, in which some of the speeches made on the first day are burlesqued in doggrel rhymes, may be called a report, The time of the Commons appears to have been chiefly occupied in discussing questions arising out of the elections of the preceding spring.
We see some of our Poets have been so indiscreet as to imitate Hudibras's Doggrel Expressions in their serious Compositions, by throwing out the Signs of our Substantives, which are essential to the English Language.
I am afraid that great numbers of those who admire the incomparable "Hudibras," do it more on account of these doggrel rhymes than of the parts that really deserve admiration. I am sure I have heard the and There was an ancient philosopher Who had read Alexander Ross over more frequently quoted than the finest pieces of wit in the whole poem. Fourth Paper.
I, too, began reading poetry, or, as my grandmother expressed it, poring over doggrel trash.... I even tried my hand at versifying, and composed a poem, descriptive of a barrel-organ, in which occurred the following two lines: 'Lo, the barrel turns around, And the cogs within resound.
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