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Updated: June 10, 2025
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.
A poor man whose cow, donkey, or flock of geese had 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livelihood on land of undistinguished ownership now found the land all enclosed and his immemorial privileges withdrawn without compensation.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:
Every paragraph is contemptuous in its tone; and till October 4th no notice is taken of the honour, when 'a correspondent says he is glad to find that the city of Aberdeen has presented Dr Johnson with the freedom of that place, for he has sold his freedom on this side of the Tweed for a pension. The definition of oats in the Dictionary is brought up against its author, and Bozzy is also attacked in a doggerel epigram on his Corsican Tour and his system of spelling.
I am the Prime Maniac. He on your right is the Chancellor of the Jingle. Next to him is the Home Doggerel. At the foot of the table is the First Lord of the Seesaw. The Foreign Doggerel is next on the left. Next again the Lord Privy Gander. One and all of us are bound to aid you, abet you, and obey you, so long as you own and wear the yellow cap. Once more, welcome, Yellow-cap!
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.
He answers yes; but greatly against his will: his inward and carnal cogitations, with which his countrymen, as well as himself, were so much delighted. Only in golden hours they seemed to leave him. Who cannot recognise the truth of this? Who has not groaned over the follies and idiocies that cling to us like the doggerel verses that hang about our memories?
Most of the rising poets, Addison, for example, John Philips, and Rowe, were studious of decency. We can hardly conceive anything more miserable than the figure which the ribald old man makes in the midst of so many sober and well-conducted youths. In the very year in which this bulky volume of obscene doggerel was published, Wycherley formed an acquaintance of a very singular kind.
Of this droll impishness of the mind, even in this carriage to-day, with these 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 singer now counted forever lost: "Ole mahs' love' wine, ole mis' love' silk "
There is little conviction and no great dignity to be drawn from the unaided pronouncement: "We're here because, We're here because, We're here because We're here," even when the doggerel is duly given the rhetorical benefit of a "Tenure by the Grace of God."
Some of the best poets who have lived wrote mere doggerel when they began. Also, many of our best prose writers were exceedingly faulty at first. It is a noble effort for a boy to put his thoughts into language, and Mr. Franklin ought to have recognized it as such. If he does not succeed in the first instance, by patience, industry, and perseverance, he may triumph at last.
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