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SOME LIMERICKS
...Ui,:..,.,....
This book is issued to Subscribers only.
// is not for sale. The Edition consists of
seven hundred and fifty numbered copies', of
which three hundred and fifty are for English
and four hundred for American collectors.
The type has been distributed.
This copy is Number 3L f
SOME LIMERICKS
Collected for the use of Students,
& ensplendour'd with Introduction,
Geographical Index, and with Notes
Explanatory and Critical
BY
NORMAN DOUGLAS
PRIVATELY PRINTED
1928
TO
THE UNKNOWN POET
A
\
CONTENTS
page
Introduction...............11
Limericks...............25
Geographical Index............93
INTRODUCTION
\
4
INTRODUCTION
He must be a quintessential fool who does not
realize that the following fifty limericks are a document
of enduring value. And I beg leave to say that the
collection has been made not for such people, but for
those who can appreciate its significance.
I may be abused on the ground that the pieces are
coarse, obscene, and so forth. Why, so they are; and
whoever suffers from that trying form of degeneracy
which is horrified at coarseness had better close the
book at once and send it back to me, in the hope that
I may be simple enough to refund him the money. As
to abuse—I thrive on it. Abuse, hearty abuse, is a
tonic to all save men of indifferent health. At the
same time I am fully convinced that nobody under the
age of ten should peruse these pages, since he would
find them so obscure in places that he might be dis-
couraged from taking up the subjedl later on, which would
be a pity. Ten, and not before, is the right age to
commence similar studies; a boy of ten is as sagacious
and profound as one of eighteen, and often more intel-
lectual. Ten was the precise age (see page 39) at which
11
I began to take interest in this class of literature, and it
has done me all the good in the world.
There was a time when one collected butterflies, or
flowers, or minerals. But the choicest specimen of (say)
precious opal can be replaced, if lost. Now if these
limericks are lost, they cannot be replaced; they are
gone for good. You may invent new ones, as many as
you please. Such new ones, however, will inevitably
have another tone, another aroma, because they belong
to another age. The discerning critic will dete<5t a
gulf both in technique and in feeling between most of
the limericks of the Golden Period and those of today,
and naturally enough, seeing that the poets, and not
only the poets of the Vi&orian and the Georgian epochs
have an entirely different outlook. Precious opal remains
the same yesterday, today, and fifty thousand years
hence.
That is why lately, with increasing intelligence, I
have taken to garnering what future collectors cannot
hope to possess without my aid—perishable material such
as the Street Games of London children, or the blas-
phemies of Florentine coachmen. It would interest me
to know what proportion of those thousand-odd Street
Games are still played, and which of them have died
out in the short interval since my little book on the
subjed was written. In that book itself I predict their
decline, and give reasons for it (page 119-121). And
it is the same with the swear words. I caught the
old ones in the nick of time. A good half of them
12
have already grown obsolete and are unfamiliar to the
new generation of such men. Why is this? Because
these men, being no longer cab-drivers but chauffeurs,
are affli&ed with the neurasthenia common to all such
mechanical folk; they lack—their distemper makes them
imagine they lack—the leisure which is essential to
the creation of original works of art, however humble;
they forget the ripe old blasphemies and have not the
wit to invent a fresh supply. How shall good things
be generated if, instead of sitting over your wine and
cheese, you gulp down a thimbleful of black coffee and
rush off again? Mechanics, not microbes, are the menace
to civilization.
A writer in the New Witness (Dec. 9, 1921) once
suggested that this collection of swear words should be
privately printed. That cannot be done; it will never
see the light of day. But I shall now permit myself, for
reasons which will be apparent later on, to reproduce
the few words of introduction which I wrote for it in
the year 1917:
"Nor is there much bad language to be found in
Romola. Perhaps the Florentines did not swear so
horribly in those days. Perhaps their present fondness
for impious inveftice is likewise a reaction from Savo-
narola's teaching (I had been discussing Savonarola's
puritanism). For Tuscans of today are pretty good
blasphemers. They have many oaths in common but,
unlike others, they pride themselves upon an individual
13
tone in this department. A self-respe6ting Florentine
would consider his life ill-spent had he not tried to add
at least one blasphemy of his own personal composition
to the city stock; it survives, or not, according to its
merits. Of how many other art-produ6ts can it be said
that merit, and merit alone, decides their survival?
"Adventures are to be adventurous.
"I have begun to make a collection of these curses,
imprecations, objurgations — abusive, vituperative or
blasphemous expletives: swear words, in short. It
already numbers thirty-eight specimens, all authentic, to
the best of my knowledge. Most of them, I regret to
say, are coupled with the name of the Deity. That
cannot be helped. I propose to treat the subjeCt in a scien-
tific spirit—from the "kulturhistorischen Standpunkt",
as the Germans say. I did not invent the swear words,
and if the reader dislikes their tone he may blame not
me but Savonarola for generating this pungent reaction
from his bigotry. Violence always begets violence. \
"Why not interest oneself in such things? Man
cannot live without a hobby. And this is folklore,
neither more nor less; an honorable hobby. Furthermore,
unlike stamp or coin collecting, it costs practically
nothing; a seasonable one. It has the additional
advantage that the field is virgin soil and the supply
of material very considerable—unlimited, I should say.
Moreover, the research leads you into strange byways
of thought and causes you to ponder deeply concerning
human nature; some of these oaths require a deal
14
of explanation; a philosopher's hobby! Unexploited,
unexplained, unexhaustible—what more can be asked?
And, as aforesaid, absurdly economical.
"There is yet more to be said in its favour. For
while these swear words are as genuine a flower of the
soil as Dante or Donatello and every bit as character-
istic, they happen to be up to date. A live hobby!
They portray modern Tuscany with greater truthfulness
than any other local product. Indeed, it will not take
you long to discover that they, and they alone, are
still flourishing in this city. For the rest of Florence
is dead or dying. The town decays, declines; it shrinks
into a village; grows more provincial every day. Pol-
itical life has yielded up the ghost; art and literature
and science, music and the state—they gasp for breath.
There is no onward movement perceptible. It either
stands still, or moves actually backwards. The oaths
alone are vital. In lightning flashes, and with terrible
candour, they reveal the genius loci."
Are not these words, most of them, applicable to
a collection of English limericks? A curious parallel!
"A self-respe6ting Englishman would consider his life
ill-spent had he not tried to add at least one limerick
of his own personal composition to the national stock;
it survives, or not, according to its merits"—how true!
And what shall we write instead of Savonarola?
We can write puritanism; indeed, we must. This
verse-form is a belated product of puritanical repression.
15
That is why Latin races cannot appreciate such literature.
If you tell a Frenchman:
II y avait un jeune homme de Dijon,
Qui n'avait que peu de religion.
II dit: "Quant a moi,
Je deteste tous les trois,
Le Pere, et le Fils, et le Pigeon" —
he will look at you in a dazed fashion, wondering
whether he has heard aright, while Spaniards are pos-
itively shocked when you translate for them a lyric
such as:
There was a young girl of Spitzbergen,
Whose people all thought her a virgin,
Till they found her in bed,
With her quim very red,
And the head of a kid just emergin'.
They regard these things as dirty. Now tell them
that all such "dirt" is the outcome of protestant
theories of life, and that the poets of the Restoration
expressed the same reactionary spirit in other metres,
and they will suggest that you become a convert to
the R. C. Faith which, they declare, is based on notions
that are both cleaner and saner. "We don't require
such ambiguous outlets," they say. It may be true.
They may not require them. But they need them.
For what have they not lost, these Latins, with their
16
Catholicism! One limerick is worth all the musty old
Saints in their Calendar. Saints are dead—they have
died out from sheer inability to propagate their species;
limericks are alive, and their procreative capacity is
amazing. (One would like to know how many new ones
are born every day.) The cult of Saints is mediaeval
affedlation; the cult of limericks, as I shall presently
show, is a Bond of Empire.
No doubt malnutrition plays a part, and Southern
races are apt to be underfed. Limericks are jovial things.
An empty stomach is hostile to every form of joviality;
it can produce nothing like the generous and full-blooded
lines already quoted. Our own half-starved classes are
a case in point: they know not these poems. The
well-fed youngsters of the universities and the stock
exchange, commercial travellers for good houses, together
with a wise old scholar or two—these are the fountain-
heads. It is gratifying, meanwhile, to have captured
a few specimens of what, historically speaking, is a
protest against protestantism, and strange to think
that our little ones would never have learnt to babble
about the "old man of Kent, whose tool was remark-
ably bent," or "the young man of Fife, who couldn't
get into his wife," but for Luther's preaching and the
victories of Naseby and Dunbar.
Whatever may be thought of speculations such as
these, there is no denying that limericks are a yea-
saying to life in a world that has grown grey. That
alone justifies their existence. They are also English
17
—English to the core. Of how many things can that
be said? Take only our other poets: can it be said
that Milton, or Keats, are English? They may have
been born in England, and they certainly write the lan-
guage of that country—quite readable stuff, some of
it. But how full of classical allusions, what a surfeit
of airs and graces! Open their pages where you will,
and you find them permeated by a cloying academic
flavour; one would think they were written for the
delectation of college professors. The bodies of these
men were English, but their souls lived abroad; and the
worst of it is, they carry their readers' souls abroad
with them—abroad, into old Greece and God knows
where, into the company of Virgil and Ariosto and Plato
and other foreigners.
There is none of that continental nonsense here.
Limericks are as English as roast beef; they, and they
alone, possess that harmonious homely ring which warms
our hearts when we hear them repeated round the camp-
fire. Wherever two or three of our countrymen are
gathered together in rough parts of the world, there
you will find these verses; it is limericks that keep the
flag flying, that fill you with a breath of old England
in strange lands, and constitute one of the strongest
sentimental links binding our Colonies to the mother-
country. Indeed, I should say that their political value
is hardly appreciated at home, and that the Colonial
Office might do worse than install a special department
for the production and export of ever-fresh material
18
of this kind (I have reason to think that such a
department is already in existence). These planters and
Civil servants, the cream of our youth, might often suffer
from the irritation produced by living lonely lives in
lonely places; they might often be at loggerheads with
each other, but for the healing and convivial influence
of limericks that remind them of common ties and com-
mon duties and a common ancestry, and make them
forget their separate little troubles. Or do you fancy
they discuss art and politics in their leisure moments?
If so, you have never lived among them. Can you
hear one of them reciting cosmopolitan effusions like
the Ode to a Nightingale or Paradise Regained? Let
him try it on!
When we consider the popularity of limericks
wherever our tongue is spoken, it is surprising how few
of them can be traced to a definite author. In no
other branch of literature do we find so great a num-
ber of anonymous writers, writers of talent and industry,
sometimes of genius, whose labours have received no
adequate reward or even acknowledgment. We hear
of the Unknown Soldier: what of the Unknown Poet?
Is he never to have his memorial? I have done my
little best in dedicating to him the following pages.
Another appropriate inscription would have been to
Queen Victoria, under whose reign these verses achiev-
ed their highest development. Edward Lear has been
fruitful and suggestive. Yet it is open to doubt whether
he was the actual inventor of such poems, as Professor
19
Saintsbury {History of Prosody, III, p. 389, note) seems
to imply; the verse must have existed before his time,
but he popularised it and fixed the epigrammatic form.
We have now abandoned his tiresome canon by which
the last word of the last line is identical with the last
word of the first; the chief difference, however, is that
ours have a deliberate meaning, while his are deliberate
nonsense.
Limericks alone would have made the Victorian
epoch memorable. That was the Golden Period. We
are now in the Silver Age, the sophisticated age, the
age of laborious ornamentation, such as:
There was a young girl of Aberystwith,
Who went to the mill they grind grist with, etc.
or
There were three young ladies of Grimsby,
Who asked: "Of what use can our quims be," etc.
or
There was a young girl of Antigua,
Whose mother said: "How very big you are," etc.
or (a less familiar example of this exotic school)
There was an old man at the Terminus,
Whose bush and whose bum were all verminous.
They said : "You sale Boche!
You really must wash
Before you start planting your sperm in us."
20
Some of these baroque things are not without charm,
but one gladly returns to the Aeschylean simplicity
of the earlier period.
I said that limericks were English; I should have
said, English and American. Whatever one may think
of America's achievements in other fields, it must be
admitted that in this one she is a worthy competitor
with the old country and that her productions are all
that could be desired in point of structural excellence
and delicacy of imagination.
Not for nothing did the Mayflower sail westwards.
And thank Heaven the cabin-passengers were puritans
and not catholics! If, later on, these good people in-
dulged in a little amateurish witch-burning out there,
they have now made amends by the non-amateurish
quality of their limericks. This verse-form, as we all
know, is of yesterday, but, once imported into the
New World, it struck its deepest roots into the soil
most congenial to such a growth—the soil of the
Eastern States. The New England regions are by far
the most productive, and such examples as are here
given have been garnered one and all by an assiduous
lady-colle6lor of Boston in the immediate vicinity
of her home. Though dealing with different parts of
America and of the world they are without exception
a local product; so she assures me. I am sorry to
have been able to include only a few samples from her
richly varied store; sorrier still not to be able to thank
her in this place for her kindness in allowing me the
21
use of these specimens. She has made it a condition that
her name shall not be mentioned in connexion with them.
And this would bring me to the final and pleasant
task of acknowledging my debt to a number of other
contributors, mostly of a still youthful age. I find my-
self, however, in a serious dilemma; none of them—
no, not a single one—will permit me to print his or
her name. Never did I have so many ardent collabor-
ators, and never such modest ones! Their unanimity
in the matter is both rare and praiseworthy, and yet I
must be allowed to say that even such a commendable
trait as self-effacement can be pushed too far, when it
leaves another man in the awkward position of being
unable to perform what he considers his duty. Modesty
is no doubt a charming characteristic of youth, but I
never knew what that word really meant, till I embark-
ed on this little undertaking.
22
LIMERICKS
There was a young plumber of Leigh,
Who was plumbing a girl by the sea.
Said she: "Stop your plumbing:
There's somebody coming!"
Said the plumber, still plumbing: "It's me."
Variant:
When she said: "Some one's coming!"
He answered (still plumbing):
"If any one's coming, it's me."
The temptation of printing this favourite is not to be
resisted, although every man, woman and child in England
knows it by heart just now.
Will they know it in fifty years' time?
That is my point.
I do not wish to appear captious but, having lived there,
I should like to observe that the place is called Leigh-on-Sea
only by courtesy. It is not on the sea; it is on the estuary
of the Thames. And when the tide is out you see neither
rock nor shingle nor sand, but an expanse of oozy mudflats
intersected by tidal creeks. These mudflats,with the sunlight
on them, are to my eyes the chief beauty of Leigh; they
glitter, or rather shine, like liquid gold. Pidturesque, abun-
dantly; but quite unfitted for plumbing purposes. Think of
the girl's dress!
25
There was an old girl from Kilkenny,
Whose usual charge was a penny.
For the half of that sum
You might roger her bum —
A source of amusement to many.
Golden Period: an improvement on Lear's version.
Kilkenny, a slumbrous old town famed for its cats and
monastic ruins, is not the kind of place to harbour people of
this profession. Puzzling over the matter, and scrutinizing
the text more closely, I find that the lady is described not
as of Kilkenny but as from there. I conclude, accordingly,
that in youth she found her way from the green fields of
Leinster into some Dublin establishment, like many another
country girl; and that it is her activities in the capital which
are here commemorated.
Be that as it may, nobody can complain of her charges.
26
That naughty old Sappho of Greece
Said: "What I prefer to a piece
Is to have my pudenda
Rubbed hard by the enda
The little pink nose of my niece."
American.
These lines being unintelligible to me, I sent them to
my lady-specialist for comment and elucidation. Her reply,
I confess, leaves me where I was—in complete ignorance of
what the poem is about. She writes: "I learnt no Greek
at school, but have of course heard of Sappho's poems. They
must be fifth-rate stuff, if she knew no more about poetry
than she did about other things. The nose: what next? Be
sure, dear Sir, there is some mistake here. The suggestion
is too absurd. No woman is ever so much of a fool, not
even under the influence of drink."
I will leave it there, and wait for enlightenment from
some other quarter, merely noting that Sappho was not
born in Greece (though a good many other people were) and
that tradition fails to record whether she had a niece or not.
27
There were two young men of Cawnpore,
Who buggared and fucked the same whore.
But the partition split,
And the spunk and the shit
Rolled out in great lumps on the floor.
Rather coarse, the last two lines; they have a schoolboy
flavour.
The danger of this playful pra<5Hce was shown up some
years ago in Tunis papers, which reported how two Arabs
were sentenced in the local Court for behaving in a similar
fashion to a young native girl.
Cawnpore, famous for the massacre of Europeans in 1857,
is—to the best of my recollection—an uncommonly dull
place; duller even than Lucknow. I see no reason why
young people should not try to amuse themselves as best
they can, in such a hole. At the same time, it would have
been wise if one or the other of them had controlled his im-
patience and waited his turn. And what was the lady doing,
to allow this proceeding: Being a prostitute, she ought to
have known what she was about. Such blame, there-
fore, as attaches to her should not be withheld.
28
There was a young girl of Pitlochry,
Who was had by a man in a rockery.
She said: "Oh! You've come
All over my bum;
This isn't a fuck — it's a mockery."
There are several fine country seats near Pitlochry and
a good many of them may have rockeries in their grounds,
but the text, as it stands, does not allow us to decide in
which of them this event took place.
To make it intelligible, we must suppose that it took
place during a dance; at night, therefore, when one gropes
about and is less sure of one's position than by daytime.
Wemust remember, too, that it happened in a rockery, whose
uneven surface is not conductive to successful copulation.
The fiasco may not have been the man's fault altogether,
though the lady's resentment is perfectly justifiable.
They will know better next time. They will realize that
rockeries are built for ferns and not for fucks.
29
There was a young fellow called Grant,
Who was made like the Sensitive Plant.
When asked: "Do you fuck?"
He replied: "No such luck!
I would if I could, but I can't."
The beauty of these lines recalls the Golden Period.
They are quite modern.
The Plant hymned by Shelley was psychologically
sensitive:
But none ever trembled and panted with bliss
In the garden, the field, or the wilderness,
Like a doe in the noontide with love's sweet want,
As the companionless Sensitive Plant.
If our poet had this variety of Plant in mind, it would
signify nothing more than that the young man was "com-
panionless," or chaste, or shy, to an abnormal degree. He
might end in overcoming this defeat with the help of some
good woman, especially if he refrains from certain practices
to which he is doubtless addicted.
I am inclined to think, however, that the reference is to
the true mimosa which is physiologically sensitive, and of
which Erasmus Darwin writes:
Weak with nice sense the chaste mimosa stands,
From each rude touch withdraws her timid hands.
And so it is. When you come across a patch of them,
30
vou have only to touch a single one with the tip of your
£nger__down they all go! A pretty sight in the case of
a plant, but not in that of a man. This drooping-on-contact
mischief is organic, incurable. I see no help for the poor
devil, since the ministrations of good women tend only to
aggravate a complaint which, fortunately, is not shared by
all of us.
"I would if I could, but I can't": there is pathos in
that line.
3*
There was a young girl of Samoa,
Who determined that no one should know her.
One young fellow tried,
But she wriggled aside,
And spilled all the spermatozoa.
Samoa, famous for the rivalry between King Mataafa
and King Malietoa, the latter of whom was favoured by the
British Government—Samoa, I say, is just the sort of place
where such things should not occur, and "Going Native'*
has very kindly supplied me with the following note:
"He must have been an amateur, a European. The cor-
poral juxta-position is not quite clear to me, but he seems to
have tried topside on, which is difficult with any one who
is both muscular and unwilling, unless you are prepared to
strangle them into unconsciousness first—and that, believe
me! is risky, as you are so liable to overdo the trick. I don't
know about Samoa, but in our Group a scientific rape always
begins sideways on and face to face (ends according to fancy).
When people, even strong ones, are on their sides, the upper
leg can easily be pushed away from the lower, and if, simul-
taneously, you interpose your body, allowing its weight to
rest upon the lower leg, which must then gradually be worked
behind your back, there is no more 'wriggling aside'; it is
merely a question of gentlemanly perseverance."
Samoan papers please copy.
32
There was an old fellow of Brest,
Who sucked off his wife with a zest.
Despite her great yowls
He sucked out her bowels,
And spat them all over her chest.
A French practice, though not confined to France; here
we have a confirmation of its dangers. One is glad to know
that the lady was his own wife, and not anybody else's.
Connubial love can take other forms as well:
There was an old man of Dundee,
Who came home as drunk as could be.
He wound up the clock
With the end of his cock,
Aud buggared his wife with the key.
I have been assured that the first of these two exquisite
lyrics is by Tennyson; that he wrote numbers of such, and
that nearly all were destroyed after his death. In point of
finish and good taste it is quite worthy of him, and that he
should have indulged his genius with this class of poetry
does not strike me as very unlikely. Whoever perpetrates
solemn rubbish like the Idyls must feel the need of un-
burdening himself from time to time, especially when gifted
with his powers of versification. Indeed, I should say that
whoever lives Tennyson's lifemustwrite an occasional limer-
ick, or burst; and it would not surprise me to learn, when
the real truth about him is published, that he died "with a
limerick on his lips."
33
There was a young lady of Thun,
Who was blocked by the Man in the Moon.
"Well, it has been great fun,"
She remarked when he'd done,
"But I'm sorry you came quite so soon."
Better things might have been expected of an old bird
like the Man in the Moon whose lady-love, in the last line,
voices the universal grievance of all civilized women.
We often say that our girls should learn this and that,
and be brought up to "our" standard, but it strikes me
that, in sexual matters, the male would also be none the
worse for some elementary education. An Arab child called
Cheira once lamented to me that, much as she liked the
European's money,she abhorred his bedside manners;"they
come and go like dogs," she declared. It is not giving our
girls a chance, to treat them in this happy-go-lucky fashion,
and I should be interested to discover what proportion of un-
satisfactory marriages are due to the bare fa6l that the male
partner does not know his business. The copulatory art has
to be learnt, like every other one, unless we want to remain
on the level of the beast.
Let us hope that some authority like Dr. Marie Stopes
will expatiate on this great wrong done to her sex, and pro-
pose a fitting remedy.
34
There was a young man of Nantucket,
Whose prick was so long he could suck it.
He said, with a grin,
As he wiped off his chin:
"If my ear were a cunt I could fuck it."
It is fortunate that this particular gift should be con-
fined to a few favoured individuals, or some of us would be
doing nothing else all day long.
"If my ear, etc." If! Always that "if"! If his mother
were a motor-bus, she would doubtless be provided with
wrheels.
A charming description of the old port of Nantucket
will be found in Moby Dick by Herman Melville, who fails,
however—though he mentions the whale-fisheries—to note
one of the most remarkable things that ever happened
there:
There was an old girl of Nantucket,
Who went down to hell in a bucket.
When asked to come out,
She replied, with a shout:
"Arse-holes, you buggars! And suck it."
An adventurous but rather rude old lady ....
Another unusual male accomplishment is recorded in
these lines:
35
There was an old man who could piss
Through a ring — and, what's more, never miss.
People came by the score
And bellowed: "Encore!
Won't you do it again, Sir? Bis! Bis!"
That the performer should have been an old man
is highly creditable to him. Young people, as a rule,
are far more proficient at this game.
36
There was a young man of Peru
Who was hard up for something to do.
So he took out his carrot,
And buggared his parrot,
And sent the results to the Zoo.
Golden Period.
It is always when people are idle or "tired of doing
nothing," as they call it, that these things occur. Which
of us has not been told that:
There was a young monk of Siberia,
Who of frigging grew weary and wearier.
At last, with a yell,
He burst from his cell,
And buggared the Father Superior?
Half the cases of rape recorded in the newspapers, the
epidemics of onanism among schoolboys—to say nothing
of a great many murders—would never be heard of, if the
perpetrators were not hard up for something to do. The larger
apes in captivity, notably mandrills, are liable to masturbate
themselves into a consumption from sheer boredom, and it is
not difficult to guess what would happen in such circum-
stances, if there were a bird handy. So true are the words
of Dr. Watts:
Satan finds some mischief still
For idle hands to do.
According to C. E. Hillier {Avifauna of the Peruvian
37
Highlands, London, 1888, p. 163) Peruvian parrots are of an
"unusually confiding disposition." This may supply a key.
He sent the results to the Zoo—where, it is to be feared,
so delicate a hybrid cannot have survived for long. I con-
jecture the specimen is now in the Museum of the College
of Surgeons.
38
There was a young man of Belgravia,
Who cared neither for God nor his Saviour.
He walked down the Strand
With his balls in his hand,
And was had up for indecent behaviour.
This is the first limerick I ever learnt, at the age of
ten; it has remained fixed in my memory. How many
other things have been forgotten! I print it chiefly to show
that even at this early period our absurd London street-
regulations were already in force. Are they never going to
be repealed?
Belgravia in those days was a fashionable quarter, in
contradistinction to the neighbouring Pimlico, though an
equal amount of copulation went on in both of them. Yet
the Pimlico standard was unquestionably lower:
There was a young lady of Slough,
Who said that she didn't know how.
Then a young fellow caught her,
And jolly well taught her —
She lodges in Pimlico now.
And so do a good many others of her kind.
39
There was a young Royal Marine,
Who tried to fart "God save the Queen."
When he reached the soprano
Out came the guano,
And his breeches weren't fit to be seen.
"God save the Queen:" that gives the approximate
date of this gem.
The soprano begins with the stirring words "Send her
victorious," and the muscular strain involved in producing
these high notes may have led to the disaster. A fit of
coughing, or even laughter, has been known to result in a
similar cataclysm—a distressing state of affairs, if you
happen to be in society at the moment.
The talent of this young Marine, though rare, is not
unique. Visitors to the Paris exhibition of 1889, if they
frequented certain low haunts, will remember a performer
called 'Thomme petard," who achieved wonderful effects
on the same organ. His vocal range was amazing, and the
soprano notes worthy of Tetrazzini. It has since occurred
to me that he may have concealed about his person the
musical instrument called "petophone," a specimen of
which I bought in Naples many years ago. It is carried
in a trousers' pocket and, when squeezed, imitates that
particular vox humana so beautifully that, after a hush of
general consternation, it becomes a great success at dinner
parties, diplomatic receptions, Royal levees, etc.
I should have liked to add a few words on the guano
deposits of Peru and of Saint Paul's Rocks, but this note is
already too long.
40
There was a young lady at sea,
Who complained that it hurt her to pee.
Said the brawny old mate:
"That accounts for the fate
Of the cook, and the captain, and me."
It is to be hoped that the vessel carried a duly qualified
surgeon, else one or the other of the sufferers might have
been in hospital later on. A neglected clap is not all beer
and skittles—beer, indeed, is stridtly to be avoided, and
jerky games may send the gonococks lower down with sad
consequences, unless you are wearing a suspender. And
even then ....
Readers will note the genial conciseness of these lines.
How much truer poetry they are than a great deal of what
is printed under that name!
4i
There was a young man of Newcastle,
Who tied up a shit in a parcel,
And sent it to Spain
With a note to explain
That it came from his grandmother's arsell.
Readers will naturally be anxious to learn the con-
tents of this note. I happen to possess a copy. It is ad-
dressed to the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture, and runs as
follows:
"Sir,
My busniss often takes me to Spanish ports, where I
see a deal of waist land round about. I arsked why not
manure it? They say, becose weve got no cowse in Spain.
I arsked why not use your own shit? They say, becose
we don't eat much in Spain, so we can't shit properly.
That is why I send you with this post a sample of our
Newcastle stuff, it comes from my grandmother who is
a hearty old lady free from all teint of desease. Perhaps you
will have it anilised and I can supply you with tons of
same up to sample strength becose we people, coal-minors
though we be, do eat properly and shit properly f.o.b.
Newcastle to any Spanish port at reasonable charges and
so change your country from a wilderniss into a smiling
Paridise and I don't think your people would mind the
smell very much once they get used to it.
Yrs obediently
42
There was a young girl of Detroit,
Who at fucking was very adroit.
She could squeeze her vagina
To a pin-point and finer,
Or open it out like a quoit.
American.
So far as my experience goes, the faculty which this
young lady possessed in so superlative a degree does not
come naturally save to a small percentage of women. It has
to be learnt; and a good deal, of course, depends on the
teacher. Some learn it easily—one might almost say with
delight; others succeed only after a certain amount of con-
scientious experimentation. A considerable number (chiefly
southerners) are unteachable, hopelessly un teachable; not a
few, again, simply too lazy. To this class belonged a pretty
but phlegmatic English girl who once applied to me for the
best method of retaining the affection of agentleman friend.
I told her. She said: "Oh, but I can't be bothered like that
each time." Soon afterwards I learnt that her friend had
discovered somebody else who could, and gladly would, be
"bothered."
It follows that women, married or single, have also
something to learn (compare page 34).
43
There was a young mate of a luggar,
Who took out a girl just to hug her.
"I've my monthlies," she said,
"And a cold in the head,
But my bowels work well ... do you buggar?
A forward young minx. I trust he began operations by
smacking her little behind with the back of a hair-brush.
It is not likely that either of them will care to reveal
what happened after that.
Here is another instance of feminine pertness:
There was a young woman who lay
With her legs wide apart in the hay.
Then, calling a ploughman,
She said: "Do it now, man!
Don't wait till your hair has turned grey!"
And we all know about the young ladies of Birming-
ham and what they did to a Bishop while he was con-
firming 'em.
44
There was a young man of Devizes,
Whose balls were of different sizes.
One was so small,
It was nothing at all;
The other took numerous prizes.
Variant:
His tool, when at ease,
Reached down to his knees;
Oh, what must it be when it rises.
If one of his testicles was "nothing at all," then this
young prize-winner was monorchous. Such people were
credited in antiquity with great sexual vigour, and the
three or four of them whom it has been my privilege to
know certainly corroborated the old belief. But they are up
a tree when their single testicle has to be removed by a
surgical operation, whereas most of us have a second one
in reserve. Even that is doomed to extraction all too fre-
quently!
The fa6l is, these obje6ls in their present situation are
exposed to so many risks that we may well envy the
whales, and in a booklet entitled "Hints for God" I make
bold to suggest that, at the next creation of the world,
they be located in a position of greater security. If He
agrees to my proposal He will earn the gratitude of all save
45
a few little boys whose testicles remain hidden upstairs,
and are anyhow too small to be taken seriously.
Whoever wishes to see what this organ can do in the
way of size should go to Pernambuco, where it is nothing
out of the way to see a man wheeling his testicles in
front of him on a barrow. I suspeft the disease (elephan-
tiasis) was imported by African negroes.
46
There was a young man of Australia,
Who painted his bum like a dahlia.
The drawing was fine,
The colour divine,
The scent — ah! that was a failure.
Flowers can be put to strange uses:
There was an aesthetic young Miss,
Who thought it the apex of bliss
To jazz herself silly
With the bud of a lily,.
Then go to the garden and piss.
These lines are American, but it is just the kind of
thing our own girls used to do in the "Yellow Book"
period.
To return to our young Australian —
As no European would behave in this fashion, we must
suppose him to have been a native. And since these natives
know nothing of paint, it follows that tattooing in colours
is intended. Australian tattooing is of no great repute; the
practice is certainly less common there than among the New
Zealanders, who used to be masters of the art, second only
to the Japanese.
Apropos of Japan—readers of Madame Chrysan theme
will recall a passage describing how that identical region of
47
the body was ingeniously utilized in the tattooing of a fox-
hunt.
Dahlias are not indigenous to Australia, but to Mexico
and Central America. The young man, therefore, cannot
havesetout to portray aflower which was unfamiliar to him;
he probably attempted a local plant (his artistic effort is said
to have been %xlike a dahlia"), and it wras doubtless a spec-
tator, some prying Englishman, who thought to detect a
resemblance between a dahlia and the tattooed surface.
My botanical expert writes: "Dahlias are first mentioned
by Hernandez in his History of Mexico, i65i;lateronby the
Frenchman Menonville, who went out there to steal the red
cochineal insect from the Spaniards. Named "for" Andrew
Dahl, Swedish botanist, and introduced into England by
the Marchioness of Bute; afterwards by Lady Holland to
Holland House. All dahlias, including the variety cock-
sinia> are scentless."
48
There was a young man of Natal,
Who was having a Hottentot gal.
She said: "Oh, you sluggard!"
He said: "You be buggared!
I like to fuck slow, and I shall."
Here is a manly young fellow who knows what he
wants, and means to get it. One would like to shake hands
with him.
The words ascribed to the girl are excusable only in
the case of a virgin. Otherwise they prove her to be ig-
norant of the refinements named on page 43 (most savages,
indeed, belong to the "unteachable" class). Hottentot
women, I am told, are unique among their kind inasmuch
as their private parts are covered by a flap of skin which
has to be drawn up before coition can take place. I cannot
quite visualize this state of affairs, but my informant, an
English sea-captain, described it as "great fun."
Another reference to the same district:
There was a young man of Natal,
And Sue was the name of his gal.
He went out one day
For a damned long way —
Right up the Suez Canal.
Suez Canal shares are an attractive investment, but
the town itself has lost all its former charms. Nothing do-
ing, nowadays, in the donkey line. It is high time the
British government took it over again.
49
There was a young man of Bengal,
Who went to a fancy-dress ball.
Just for a whim
He dressed up as a quim,
And was had by the dog in the hall.
This must be the same quimsical youngster who, on
another such occasion, wore a frill round his tool and went
as a ham. Bengal is a lively place, and the ladies are also
not coy.
There was a young man of Bengal,
Who swore he had only one ball.
Then two little bitches,
They pulled down his breeches,
And found he had none at all.
I witnessed a similar incident long ago in a third-class
railway compartment near Manchester, where a handful of
fadlory-girls forcefully undressed a boy amid shrieks of
laughter. Although his outfit left nothing to be desired,
they did not succeed in making him rise to the occasion.
You cannot do so—at least, not everybody can—when
other people are laughing all the time.
I wonder, by the way, whether such things happen in
these days?
5o
There was a young man called McLean,
Who invented a fucking machine.
Concave or convex,
It would fit either sex,
And was perfectly simple to clean.
American. — Variants to last line:
The God-damndest thing ever seen . . .
And guaranteed used by the Queen . . .
I have puzzled till I can puzzle no more what the shape
of this contrivance may have been, how it worked, and of
what materials it was constructed. Out of American postal
directories I obtained the addresses of 73a persons bearing
the name of McLean, and circularized them, asking whether
they are the lucky inventor, begging for further details,
and offering to buy three or four dozen specimens for dis-
tribution among my friends.
Not a single reply up to date!
We may be sure that it was an efficient instrument, since
the originator seems to have been of Scotch ancestry. It was
"perfectly simple to clean:' there you have the practical
Scotsman.
P.S. The following letter on this subject has just reached me:
5*
Williamstown, Mass.
2 March, 1928
Dear Sir,
Your circular of the 18 January addressed to my late
husband has been opened by myself. I am sorry to have to
inform you that he was not the maker of the instrument in
question.
Pardon my frankness but, as you seem to be a man of
the world, you will perhaps understand that, being now a
widow, I am excusably interested in such a machine and
would like, just for curiosity's sake, to purchase a specimen,
if not too expensive. Should it be of a breakable nature,
I might even take two. I will undertake to procure you a
good many clients in our country, if the mechanism comes
up to expectation.
Will you remember me when you have succeeded in dis-
covering the inventor? Please try not to forget!
Yours gratefully in anticipation
Eleanor McLean
52
There was an old man of Brienz,
The length of whose cock was immense.
With one swerve he could plug
A boy's bottom in Zug
And a kitchen-maid's cunt in Coblenz.
A garangtuan implement in truth, seeing that the dis-
tance from Brienz to Zug is 58 kilometres, and to Coblenz
immeasurably greater. If the author of this poem was not
stretching a point, somebody else was plainly stretching a
penis. The Swiss, for the rest, do not seem to be favoured
in this respect (G. Westlake, F.R.S. Penis-measurements in
the Alps London, 1889, plates V to XXI).
The nearest approach to such an object is what I have
seen among the Masai, whose organs were also thrown on
the screen many years ago during a lecture by Mrs. Sheldon
to a select but delighted audience at the Zoological Society's
rooms. The queer copulatory methods necessitated by such
growths have been described with great detail by a number
of Christian missionaries, who are keenly interested in such
matters.
I should like to point out that the word "plug" does
not rime wTith "Zug" except in Lancashire.
We may hazard a guess that the author of this poem
was born at Accrington.
53
There was a young man of Calcutta,
Who tried to write "Cunt" on a shutter.
He had got to "C - U -"
When a pious Hindu
Knocked him arse over tip in the gutter.
These venerable lines are of interest to anthropolo-
gists; they emphasize a racial characteristic which we
Europeans would do well to bear in mind. The Hindu
did not behave in this brusque fashion because he was
"pious" — "pious Hindu" is just afa$on de parler — but
because sex, to these people, is too solemn a thing to be
joked about. Such is the Hindu's nature. His mind is a
cesspool; his erotic literature must be read to be believed;
but the idea of writing "cunt" on a shutter gives him the
creeps.
They have forgotten how to laugh, these harassed
and withered races.
54
There was an old man of Corfu,
Who fed upon cunt-juice and spew.
When he couldn't get this,
He fed upon piss —
And a bloody good substitute, too.
Variant:
When he couldn't get that,
He ate what he shat —
And bloody good shit he shat, too.
A horrid banquet; yet such perversions do occur. Copro-
phagous individuals are not unknown, and Prof. Maudsley
writes (Pathology of Mind p. 358) that "smell and taste are
sometimes extremely vitiated...hair, filth, live frogs, worms
and similar disgusting matters being swallowed with
greedy relish.''
As to drinking urine — the women of a tribe near
Dodoma in Africa, whose name I forget, preserve a sample
of their husband's urine during his absence from home,
and drink it on his return. The custom is not popular
among European ladies; not yet, at all events.
Corfu, nowadays, is remembered by tourists on account
of a hideous building called the Achilleion. Edward Lear,
the popularizer of limericks and doubtless the author of this
very one, knew better and spent some of the happiest years
of his life there. But the food is indifferent, and there is
only one tavern in the town where drinkable wine can be
procured.
55
There was a young lady of Kew,
Who said, as the curate withdrew:
"I prefer the dear vicar;
He's longer and thicker;
Besides, he comes quicker than you."
Kew is famous not for this or any other young lady but
for its bontanic gardens, which prove what good taste com-
bined with perseveranceandscientificknowledge can achieve
under an English sky—with the assistance of time. For
they did not grow up in a day. The Hortus Kewensis of
William Alton was published as early as 1789; its three
volumes, consisting of some five hundred pages each, are a
catalogue of the plants already growing there. Caroline, wife
of George II, spent a great deal on the place; Sir William
Chambers is responsible for some of the buildings; Cobbett,
after running away from home, entered Kew as a gardener.
When one has lived, as I have, at 298 Kew Road (back
room), one has abundant opportunities of becoming ac-
quainted not only with its flora, but with attractive speci-
mens of its Sunday-afternoon fauna.
The last line of this poem shows the lady to have been
an ignorant little thing; she on page 34,1 think, would have
clung to the curate despite his apparent defeats. Mere size
cannot hope to compete with a rhythmic ritardando con
sentimento.
56
There was a young girl of Penzance,
Who boarded a bus in a trance.
The passengers fucked her,
Likewise the conductor;
The driver shot off in his pants.
This is the very episode which induced the City Fathers
of Penzance to abolish those slow horse-buses in favour of
quicker modes of public locomotion.
All too many cases are on record of girls and boys being
abused while in a state of trance, or under the influence of
anaesthetics or drugs; medical men themselves have not
escaped the imputation of taking advantage of young
patients on such occasions. One wonders, at the same
time, how an event like this came to occur in England, in a
public vehicle, and in broad daylight. How was it that none
of these folk raised his voice in protest against the beha-
viour of the conductor and other passengers?
The driver alone seems to have preserved an outward
air of decorum. The bus was presumably in motion, and he
could not abandon the reins. One shudders to think what he
would have done, had he been free to use his hands and
move about like the others.
A deplorable business from beginning to end ....
especially for the driver.
57
There was an old man of the Cape,
Who buggared a Barbary ape.
Said the ape: "Sir, your prick
Is too long and too thick,
And something is wrong with the shape."
Now what was wrong with the shape?
A variant to the last three lines wrill help to clear
up the mystery:
The ape said: "You fool!
YouVe got a square tool;
YouVe buggared my arse out of shape."
This is a legitimate cause of remonstrance on the
part of anybody in the ape's position. At the same time,
I must say I have never seen a square tool, though many
are not altogether round. Perhaps the ape was exagger-
ating. Perhaps it only felt square. "We generally find,"
says the Rev. Sydney Smith in his Sketches of Moral Phil-
osophy, "that the triangular person has got into the square
hole, the oblong into the triangular, and a square person
has squeezed himself into the round hole."
According toXavier Mayne {The Intersexes,**, d. p.39;
see also Garnier's well-known book) "entire genera of the
ape and monkey family" are given to practising simili-sex-
ualhabits,"even when the male has access to the female for
hetero-sexualcopulation/'Thisparticularapewasobviosly
58
no novice at such diversions; indeed his language reveals
him as a well-mannered but impenitent uranian.
Although to the best of my knowledge, no authentic
case has yet come to light, it is a firmly established belief
among African natives that the greater apes occasionally
have intercourse with human beings. And why shouldn't
they? It's all in the family ....
59
There was an old man of Stamboul
With a varicose vein in his tool.
In attempting to come
Up a little boy's bum
It burst, and he did look a fool.
Stamboul has been famous for thesepra6tices since long,
the Sultans setting the example. The present government
represses them, save in stridtly religious circles. Whether
there be any connexion between the two things I cannot say,
but the Turks, in May of this year, struck me as a far more
stupid race than they were before this repression began.
Varicose veins are a nuisance, and sometimes have to be
treated surgically. Regarding the case in point, my medical
expert writes: "Permanent venous dilatations of that par-
ticular organ are unknown in England, though the sur-
rounding region is liable to such congestions (e.g. varico-
cele, haemorrhoids). It may be a Turkish variety of this
complaint. To wear a tight worsted stocking round your
member, asyoudoroundyourleg, does not commend itself
to me, but perhaps Orientals approve of this treatment.
These affe&ed veins are often the result of pregnancy: can
this apply to the present instance? I doubt it! You will
see that the textbooks give 'prolonged standing' as an-
other cause of the trouble, and I suspedl it was the deter-
mining factor in the present case."
A certain amount of standing is no doubt desirable, but
one can have too much ofagood thing."Prolonged standing"
strikes me as the only adequate explanation of this acci-
dent. I think my expert deserves his fiver.
60
There was a young curate of Buckingham,
Who was blamed by the girls for not fucking 'em.
He said: "Though my cock
Is as hard as a rock,
Your cunts are too slack. Put a tuck in 'em."
Some girls are hard to please. Here is another of these
groundless complaints:
There was a young lady of Twickenham,
Who regretted that men had no prick in 'em.
On her knees every day
To God she would pray
To lengthen, and strengthen, and thicken 'em.
Perhaps the young man mentioned on page 3$ would
have suited her requirements; if not, then he on page 53.
As to the curate of Buckingham—I regard his request
as a reasonable one. I have been tempted to make it myself
on several occasions.
61
There was an old Abbot of Khief,
Who thought the Impenitent Thief
Had bollocks of brass,
And an amethyst arse.
He died in this awful belief.
Variant to last two lines:
And an ivory arse —
A faith surpassing belief!
This poem bears the hall-mark of authenticity.
Khief, with the oldest cathedral in Russia, has always
been famous as a holy city, and Russia itself has always been
famous for the extravagances of its religious se<5ts. No dogma
so absurd, that some Russian will not be found to believe it.
The modern Skoptzi, for instance, have nothing to learn from
this old Abbot in point of gross superstition. It is consol-
ing to know that he was regarded as a heretic, since his
belief is described as "awful." He died in this awful belief:
the pigheadedness of all sectarians!
The word "ivory" in the variant may refer to the pro-
duct commercially called fossil ivory—the tusks of Siberian
mammoths. But amethysts are also Russian stones, though
I fancy that the finest specimens on the market (faintly
clouded with brown) come from elsewhere. Had it not been
a question of historical accuracy, the poet might with equal
propriety have written "emerald" instead of "amethyst."
62
Russian emeralds—discovered 1830—yield to none in point
of tint, but they are even more liable to flaws than those
from the old mines of Muso near Bogota.
We may note that "Khief/' as pronounced by Rus-
sians, does not rime with "thief.''
It should.
63
There was a young girl of Baroda,
Who built a new kind of pagoda.
The walls of its halls
Were hung with the balls
And the tools of the fools that bestrode her.
A dainty little item from America.
The structure referred to must be of recent date. It is
not mentioned in Fergusson's monumental work on Indian
architecture, and nothing was known of it during my last
stay in the old Mahratta city, else I should certainly have
visited it in preference to cotton mills and other local
sights. It must be a cosy kind of place.
Pagodas are expensive to build, and thisyoung Amazon
was doubtless rich; no richer, I daresay, than some of our
English lady-millionaires. The late Baroness Burdett-
Coutts, for instance, was famous for her munificence in
endowing public buildings.
That temples should be used for the preservation of
trophies is a universal trait. We need only think of St.
George's Chapel or Westminster Abbey. Under the Greeks
and Romans they served a similar purpose, beside being
both banks and museums, and brothels.
64
There was a young girl who would make
Advances to snake after snake.
She said: "I'm not vicous,
But so superstitious!
I do it for Grandmama's sake."
This poem is obscure. Indeed, I should never have un-
ravelled its meaning but for the fortunate discovery that
the young lady in question was the granddaughter of Mrs.
Ethel Bartlett of Nottingham.
Who remembers Mrs. Bartlett?
Yet she, together with Sir Francis Galton and others,
was one of the pioneers of the eugenic cult in England; she
wanted to "improve the race." This movement was at first
considered something of a fad, and many of its supporters by
their wild theories may well have deserved the name of fad-
dists. Among these forgotten enthusiasts was Mrs. Bartlett.
She is described as a sweet-natured old lady, but rather
fanatical. The family still possesses a manuscript of hers
which contains a furious denunciation of modern standards
of health and intelligence—the result of faulty breeding,
and of marriages which should never have been allowed. It
goes on to review the parentage of some of the great men of
antiquity, and finally asks: "Which of us women would not
like to have Alexander of Macedon for a son?" This half-
god among men, she declared, was the offspring of his
mother Olympias and a serpent.
Such daring dodlrines she must have inculcated into the
65
mind of her granddaughter, and it is pathetic to note how
the girl apologizes for appearing vicious and how, in describ-
ing herself as superstitious, she seems to waver between a
reverence for the old lady's teaching and the reasonable
conviction that unions like that of Olympias would prove
sterile save in very exceptional cases.
She died at a ripe age,unmarried,on the 23 March, 1922.
66
There was an old man of Madrid,
Who cast loving eyes on a kid.
He said: "Oh, my joy!
I'll buggar that boy,
You see if I don't" — and he did.
Variant to last line:
And he out with his cock, and he did —
which, to my way of thinking, is a little gross.
Nothing venture, nothing win; moreover, to the pure
all things are pure, and none but the brave deserve the fair.
It takes a brave man to act like this in broad daylight ("you
see if I don't": who can see at night-time ?) and in a town like
Madrid, where these practices do not seem to be prevalent.
A recently published book, The Quest by Pio Baroja, deals
largely with the poorer boys of Madrid, and contains not
the least hint of such things. But this may prove nothing
more than that the author was too decent-minded to give
his young friends away.
Some Spanish kids are remarkably pretty, and have the
most engaging manners—which they lose soon enough,
together with their looks. The old man in the poem no
doubt gave this particular one a few chocolates or a packet
of cigarettes, or even both, and made an appointment for
another meeting.
Who wouldn't?
67
There was a young fellow called Cary,
Who got fucking the Virgin Mary.
And Christ was so bored
At seeing Ma whored
That he set himself up as a fairy.
American; and it may be mentioned that " fairy" is
the American term for a male prostitute.
This poem, with its faulty metre and irreverential sug-
gestions, finds a place here only because, under the guise of
an allegory, it hints at an important truth. Statistics are
not available, but, from such first-hand knowledge as I
have acquired in Paris and elsewhere, I should say that a
great number of male prostitutes are children of harlots.
The mother, fond as she may be of her son, cannot avoid
initiating him at a tender age into all the mysteries of her
trade; the temptation of eking out your own income with
your boy's earnings is also hard to resist, and probably not
worth resisting. A certain number of such youths become
blackmailers; the rest, in due course, take to brothel-
keeping and other more or less cheerful professions.
"Bored" is therefore not the right word; "excited"
would be better. It is a case of mental over-stimulation
backed my maternal encouragement.
68
There was an old girl of Silesia,
Who said: "As my cunt doesn't please yer,
You might as well come
Up my slimy old bum,
So Jimmy the tapeworm don't seize yer."
We have all heard of prisoners, during their weary
hours of captivity, making pets of mice and rats, and even
spiders; but this is the only case that has come to my
knowledge of a tapeworm becoming the object of human
love, and bearing the homely name of "Jimmy."
I was so interested in these delightfully familiar rela-
tions between a worm and its Silesian host that I sent the
verse to a scientific friend in Breslau for such observations
as he might care to make. Fie forwarded my letter to an
eminent surgeon and helminthologist, Dr. Brochowski of
Cracow, whose reply, though not flattering to myself, shall
be printed none the less:
"Dear Professor—, Thanks for yours of the 18 July
with the query from your English correspondent. Having
read some of his books in Polish translations, I took him to
be a man of at least average intelligence. That cannot be
the case, else the idea of making a pet of a tapeworm could
never have occurred to him. Regarding the second part of
his query, whether tapeworms ever bite, I can only say that
I have performed hundreds of anal explorations with my
finger, and have never been molested by them. There is a
69
i
case on record, however, of a Dutch doctor being terribly |
mauled on one such occasion. I will look up the reference I
for you, and send it some time next week. J
Yours very sincerely, I
Ossip Brochowski." i
70
There was a young lady named Skinner,
Who dreamt that her lover was in her.
She woke with a start,
And let a loud fart,
Which was followed by luncheon and dinner.
The muscular contraction provoked by a dream of this
nature led to the same result as that described on page 40.
Note the truthfulness of the last line. The accident oc-
curred at night, and if the poet had written "followed by
dinner and luncheon" the meals would have been excreted
in their wrong order—a feat which I defy anybody to
perform.
The effe6ts of these involuntary spasms are alluded to
in another poem:
I dined with the Duchess of Lee,
Who asked: "Do you fart when you pee?"
I said with some wit:
"Do you belch when you shit?"
And felt it was one up to me.
A noble verse, and worthy of old England in its lack
of polysyllables.
71
There was an old buggar of Como,
Who suddenly cried: "Ecce Homo!"
He tracked his man down
To the heart of the town,
And gobbled him off in the duomo.
Supplied by a well-known English man of letters, a
summer visitor to the Italian lake district.
Pliny the Elder lived in Como and has now a hotel and
a miserable street named after him; his nephew was born
there, as was also Volta, who is indirectly responsible for
the existence of telephones and other curses of humanity.
There is this to be said for the old man of Como, that
he seems to have studied Latin in his youth, which is more
than can be said of most of the inhabitants. They are hope-
lessly industrial; in other words, hopelessly dull.
The duomo or cathedral is described by Baedeker as
one of the finest in North Italy. I enquired of the author
wThy the old man should have selected just this structure
for his purposes. He replied: "Idiot! Because it's safer
than the Public Gardens."
We live and learn.
7
There was a young student of John's,
Who wanted to buggar the swans.
But the loyal hall-porter
Said: "Pray take my daughter!
The birds are reserved for the dons."
The loyalty of College-porters is traditional, and only
surpassed by their politeness. Note the politeness of this
one. It is typical of all of them.
The family of the anatidae seems to be favoured of man-
kind, and this much may be said in extenuation of the young
man's proclivities that the swan is a comely bird. Not for
nothing was it chosen by the Father of the Gods on a cer-
tain memorable occasion. If Zeus had transformed himself
intoaduck,Ledawouldhardlyhavesuccumbedtohischarms.
Yet ducks are also attractive fowls, as any Chinaman will
tell you. They have a veritable cult of them in that country,
and that is why European residents refuse to eat them.
The last line may explain why the Thames swans are
no longer served at banquets, as they were in the days of
Queen Elizabeth. They are reserved for other, and perhaps
worthier, purposes. Spanish geese are apt to be crotchety:
There was an old man of Santander,
Who attempted to buggar a gander.
But the silly old bird
Stuffed its arse with a turd —
We may be sure that English swans are more amen-
able to reason.
73
Said the venerable Dean of Saint Paul's
"Concerning them cracks in the walls —
Do you think it would do,
If we filled them with glue?"
The Bishop of Lincoln said: "Balls."
For the benefit of future generations it should be said
that not long ago certain ominous fissures appeared in this
edifice; they were attributed to ceaseless and heavy traffic;
experts were summoned, commissions appointed, and costly
repairs undertaken. An awkward discovery, for no architect
will admit that St. Paul's could be shaked by motor-lorries
unless, like certain other London churches and English
cathedrals in general, it were a jerry-built affair.
This poem is open to grave suspicion. In the firstplace,
the Dean of St. Paul's is necessarily a gentleman, and no
gentleman says "them cracks." Secondly: what was the
Bishop of Lincoln doing there ? Thirdly: the expression at-
tributed to His Lordship is too emphatic to be consistent
with good manners.
I regard the whole incident as apocryphal.
74
There was a young lady called Wylde,
Who kept herself quite undefiled
By thinking of Jesus,
Contagious diseases,
And the bother of having a child.
American.
This prudent young person hit upon the three chief de-
terrents to leading a loose life; a single one of them, I should
have thought, would suffice for that purpose. The religious
deterrent, once the strongest, seems to have lost something
of its hold upon the modern woman. The second or medical
one will never lose its hold; everybody knows that these
diseases, a real menace to society, are now engaging the
attention of public bodies all over Europe. Thirdly, the
social stigma that would attach to a young girl, were she
known to be pregnant, is incalculable—"bother" is a mild
word for it—and often drives her into some nasty cottage
down Cornwall way, or into the consulting room of people
who "use instruments with a view to procuring a certain
result"—the result to themselves being even more certain,
namely, seven years.
75
There was a young man of Peru,
Who dreamt he was had by a Jew.
He woke up at night
In a hell of a fright,
And found it was perfectly true.
That dreams should convey premonitions of bodily
states is well known to the medical profession. An oncom-
ing illness is often heralded in dreams by a sense of un-
easiness in that particular region of the body, and it is
the experience of nearly all boys that nocturnal emissions
are preceded by sexually suggestive visions on the part of
the sleeper.
My Lima correspondent writes:
"From enquiries made among our Jewish colony I
gather that sodomitic practices are quite as common among
them as among Christians. There is this difference, how-
ever, that the latter indulge in them from natural disposi-
tion ; the Jews, because they consider them more hygienic
and more economical than normal coition."
This little note, of great ethnological interest, is con-
firmed by the following:
There was a young Jew of Delray,
Who buggared his father one day.
He said: "I like rather
To stuff it up Father;
He's clean, and there's nothing to pay."
76
A thrifty youth, with strongly developed patriarchal
instindls ...
I dete6l a smack of incest in the above lines; readers
of the Bible will not be surprised at such things.
Delray is in Michigan.
77
There was a young man of Madras,
Who was having a boy in the grass.
Then a cobra-capello
Said: "Hello, young fellow!"
And bit a piece out of his arse.
Late Vi6torian.
This is the second instance of a serpent speaking in the
tongue of man, and quite as authentic as that recorded in
Genesis.
Yet there is something wrong here. Cobras do not tear
pieces of flesh out of their vi&irns' bodies. As everybody
knows, they injeft poison: a poison so lethal that it is respon-
sibleforseveralthousand yearly deathsinlndiaalone. Among
the most famous researches into cobra-poison are the early
ones of Sir Jos. Fayrer. They were conduced over a period
of three years, and led him to the conclusion that antidotes
such as aristolochia (proposed by Tennent and others) were
of no avail. The treatment of snake-bite has made great
strides since those days.
It is to be feared that the young man commemorated in
this poem had no antidote at hand, and that he therefore
paid with his life for what, in India, is a matter of
individual taste.
78
There was a young lady of Louth,
Who returned from a trip in the South.
Her father said: "Nelly,
There's more in your belly
Than ever went in at your mouth."
An elegant example of the Golden Period.
My memories of Dundalk are confused; it rained all
the time, and I recall nothing save a tavern where I spent
several hours drinking the local brew (not bad) with a couple
of decayed sailormen.
"Trip to the South" is vague. We may take it, none
the less, that the girl left Ireland and went not exactly to
the South Pole—else she would never have " returned''—
but somewhere in that direction; moreover, that she was
unaccompanied by her father. She went alone. Persons
who travel alone are no longer children. She must have
attained her majority, and girls of that age can do what
they please and should not be subject to uncalled-for rem arks
on the part of anybody. The words uttered by the father
will suffice to date this poem: it belongs to the Vi<5torian era.
No modern parent will dream of addressing his
grown-up daughter in such terms.
79
The girls who frequent pi6ture-palaces
Set no store by psychoanalysis.
And though Mr. Freud
Is greatly annoyed,
They cling to their old-fashioned phalluses.
Query: "Old-fashioned fallacies?"
American; sophisticated school.
It struck me as so improbable that the gentleman in
question should be annoyed at a trifle like this that I ven-
tured to enquire in very civil terms of a disciple of his,
likewise an expert, whether there was any truth in the sug-
gestion. His answer ought to clear up the matter. He
writes:
"Sir,
With reference to yours of the 3 instant, it is an imper-
tinence to suppose that the Master should be annoyed, and
I shall certainly not incommode Him with your nonsensical
conundrum. Do you imagine that He, or anybody else,
cares a fucking damn what the little bitches cling to? Let
them cling to each others' twats, if they can.
Yours truly
(Dr.) E. Sauberger
P.S. By all means print this letter in any preposterous
article or book you may be writing. E.S."
80
There was a young man of Kildare,
Who was having a girl in a chair.
At the sixty-third stroke
The furniture broke,
And his rifle went off in the air.
It was presumably one of those cheap Vienna chairs
which are exported in great quantities to Kildare and other
Irish towns, and which should never be used for such pur-
poses. But the young man was also to blame for being so
long about the business. Sixty-three strokes! Even London
chairs, excellent as they are, will feel that strain.
People with such deliberate methods should stick to
the floor, where a rug, or preferably the fur of some animal,
will be found a welcome adjunct.
81
There was a young lady of Ealing,
Who had a peculiar feeling.
She lay on her back,
And opened her crack,
And pissed from the floor to the ceiling.
An Anonymous pamphlet lying before me (Geography
Without Groans: a Few Words on the Use of Limericks
in County Council Schools, London, 1913) goes far to prove
what I never thought possible—that this verse-form has an
educational value of its own. The author, whom I take to
be a schoolmaster and to whom I wish all success, says that
even a dry subje6l like Geography can be made attractive to
children; and that if the place-names have some easily re-
membered lines attached to them, the teacher's taskis greatly
facilitated, because at the mere mention of the verse "they
will at once brighten up, and give the corre6l latitude and
longitude, mountain-ranges, river-basins, exports, and all
information required." Especially is this the case, he says,
with those confusing London suburbs, a knowledge of which
is so important to the poor children of County Council
Schools.
Master (sternly): What, don't you boys know any-
thing about Ealing? Haven't I taught you that
There was a young lady of Ealing,
Who had a peculiar —
82
Chorus: Oh, yessir! She piddled all over the ceiling.
It's the birth-place of Huxley, and exports City clerks,
and imports dirty washing, and is watered by three main
drains, and lies in latitude —
Master: That will do.
83
There was a young man of Loch Leven,
Who went for a walk about seven.
He fell into a pit
That was brimful of shit,
And now the poor buggar's in heaven.
This faulty rime must have been concocted by an English-
man or American; no native of the country would think
of making "Loch Leven" go together with "Heaven,"
save so far as natural scenery is concerned. And the acci-
dent becomes intelligible if we suppose that it occurred not
in the morning but at seven in the evening. At that hour
of an autumn or winter month it is already pitch-dark in the
latitude of Loch Leven.
The shit-pits > as they are locally called, used to be very
common in England. Fabyan's Chronicles (1516) relate that
in 1252 a Jew of Tewkesbury fell into one of them on a
Saturday, but refused to be taken out on his Sabbath;
whereupon the Earl of Gloucester, who was not to be outdone
in religious zeal, refused to take him out on Sunday. On
Monday he was found to be dead. They were introduced
into Scotland about 150 years ago by one James Macpherson,
a tea-merchant and shrewd pioneer, who had observed them
in China, where they are known aspupu-holes. To disappear
into an unfenced pupu-hole—if fenced round, how are you
going to use it?—is an ordinary form of death out there,
and even in Scotland fatal accidents have lately become so
84
frequent that the custom, despite its obvious conveniences, is
beginning to lose ground.
As to the victim being now in Heaven—we must take
our poet's word for that. I think, unless they have fished
him out, he will be found where he was.
85
Thus spake i am that i am:
"For the Virgin I don't give a damn.
What pleases me most
Is to buggar the Ghost,
And then be sucked off by the Lamb."
This lyric savours of profanity , and yet its authorship has
been claimed by no less than eleven Bishops and five minor
Canons of the Church of England. I am not going to print
all their names, much less shall I undertake the invidious
task of deciding which of them is the real author; that would
stir up a veritable wasps' nest. All I venture to suggest is
that a gentleman endowed with poetic talents of this nature
would have done well to seek employment in some other
walk of life.
The lines are obviously derived from the immortal trilogy:
Thus spake the King of Siam:
"For women I don't care a damn.
But a fat-bottomed boy
Is my pride and my joy —
They call me a buggar: I am."
which is followed by:
Then up spake the Bey of Algiers:
"I am old and well stricken in years,
And my language is blunt;
But a cunt is a cunt,
And fucking is fucking" — {loud cheers).
86
which calls for:
Then up spake the young King of Spain:
"To fuck and to buggar is pain.
But it's not infra dig
On occasion to frig,
And I do it again and again."
87
There was a young man of Cape Horn
Who wished he had never been born.
And he wouldn't have been
If his father had seen
That the end of the rubber was torn.
I should apologise for inserting this well-known lyric but
for the facft that so perfeit a specimen of the Golden Period
cannotbe excluded from a collection like this. The smooth-
ness of the versification: the glamour that hangs about
mysterious regions like Tierra del Fuego: the wistfulness
of the opening lines and the anticlimax of the last one —
they all testify to the genius of the Unknown Poet.
It is not surprising that the young man in question
should have suffered from melancholia. Travellers concur in
stating that this is one of the gloomiest landscapes on earth;
a desolation of fog, drizzle, and snow. Charles Darwin,
in his Voyage of the Beagle, tells us that "Death, instead
of Life, seems the predominant spirit" of those parts, and
a more recent writer, Metcalfe, reports that the natives
are letting themselves die out, apparently, from "sheer
weariness of living."
I cannot say how that rubber came to reach Cape Horn;
maybe it was bartered by the mate of a passing whaler for
a dozen sea-otter skins. These appliances are supposed to be
of French origin, but they must have been already known
at the Byzantine Court, if what Gibbon calls "the most
88
detestable precautions" of Theodora were of this kind.
And some curious material has now come to light (Prof. O.
Schwanzerl, Kondonsgebrauch im fruhesten Mittelalter
Budapesth, 1903) showing that they were in use under the
Merovingians. They were made of deerskin —gegerbtes
Hirschleder — and smeared with tallow— Unschlick—to
facilitate penetration. (For an analogous use of leather see
Mime vi and vn of Herodas). The invention was attributed
to the Queen who, while fond of lovers, insisted, and
rightly, on the legitimacy of her offspring.
The world would be a better place, if modern women
had the same respe6l for their husbands.
89
1
GEOGRAPHICAL INDEX
Accrington, birth-place of Unknown Poet, 53.
Algiers, Bey of, utters a splendid Profession of Faith, 86.
America, Central, its dahlias, 48.
Australia, floral design by a native of, 47.
Baroda, architectural activities in, 64.
Belgravia, contradistinguished from Pimlico, 39.
Bengal, produces a sportive brood, 50.
Brest, uxorious condudt by native of, 33.
Brienz, distance from Zug, 53; from Coblenz, ibid.
Buckingham, justifiable retort by local ecclesiastic, 61.
Calcutta, contains an epigraphical curiosity, 54.
Cawnpore, amusements of its younger generation, 28.
China, edifying fate of local ducks, 73; its sanitary
system introduced into Scotland, 84.
Coblenz, a lucky kitchen-maid of, $3.
Como, why its cathedral is preferable to the Public
Gardens, 72.
Corfu, singular diet at, 55.
Cornwall, retreat for impulsive girls, 75.
Delray, traces of patriarchalism among its Hebrew
colony, 76-77.
Detroit, renowned lady-performer at, 43.
93
Devizes, birth-place of prize-winner, 45.
Dodoma, touching custom of native women, 55.
Dublin, cost of living in, 26.
Dundalk, its moist climate, 79.
Dundee, a model husband of, 33.
Ealing, hydraulics at, 82-83.
England, introduction of exotic flowers into, 48.
Good Hope, Cape of, accommodating habits of indigenous
quadrumana, 58-59.
Greece, not the birth-place of Sappho, 27.
Heaven, possible domicile of young Scotsman, 85.
Hell, perilous descent into, 35.
Horn, Cape, hypochondria among its aborigenes, 88;
imports French goods, ibid.
India, lack of consideration in local snakes, 78.
Japan, specializes in tattooing, 47.
John's College, class privilege at, 73.
Kew Gardens, a miracle of horticultural art, 56.
Khief, religious extravagance in, 62.
Kildare, rifle-practice at, 81.
Kilkenny, birth-place of popular philanthropist, 26.
Lancashire, a peculiarity of its dialed, 53.
Lee, Duchess of, her sprightly talk provokes a repartee, 71.
94
Leigh, boasts of picturesque but inconvenient beach, 25.
Leven, Loch, fatal accident at, 84.
Lincoln, Bishop of, forcible expression attributed to, 74.
London, rare hybrid in Zoological Gardens, 38; its
prehistoric street-regulations, 39; defective con-
struction of certain churches in, 74; produces
chairs of superior workmanship, 81; its confusing
suburbs, 82.
Louth, a blunt old resident of, 79.
Lucknow, not so dull as Cawnpore, 28.
Madras, indelicate behaviour of local cobra, 78.
Madrid, a pushful citizen of, 67.
Manchester, waggishness of mill-hands near, 50.
Mexico, its botanical glories, 48.
Moon, Man of, his inexcusable conduct, 34.
Muso, famous for emerald mines, 63.
Nantucket, enviable accomplishments of a resident, 35.
Naples, sale of musical instruments at, 40.
Natal, a hefty young native of, 49; memorable feat
of pedestrianism by another native, ibid.
Newcastle, proposes to export not only coal, 42.
Nottingham, birth-place of Mrs. Ethel Bartlett, 65.
Paris, speciality of its 1889 exhibition, 40; precocious
development of boy-children in, 68.
Penzance, why its horse-buses were abolished, 57.
Pernambuco, popularity of wheel-barrows in, 46.
95
Peru, affectionate nature of its parrots, 38; contains
guano, 40; thrift among Jewish colony of, 76.
Pimlico, its low social standard, 39.
Pitlochry, bad shooting at, 29.
St. Paul's Rocks, rich in guano, 40.
Samoa, sad waste at, 32.
Santander, recalcitrant avifauna of, 73.
Scotland, genial invention by a native of, 51; introduces
a Chinese custom, 84.
Siam, official pronouncement by King of, 86.
Siberia, monastic discipline in, 37.
Silesia, harbours unusual domestic pets, 69.
Slough, ignorance of young lady-resident, 39.
South Pole, not visited by Irish girl-tourist, 79.
Spain, proje6l for fertilizing arid traits of, 42; its ruler
disinclined for tete-a-tete diversions, 87.
Stamboul, case of varicose veins at, 60.
Strand, local police-regulations defied, 39.
Suez, abolition of time-honoured rites at, 49;—Canal,
a good long walk, ibid.
Tewkesbury, Lord's Day observance at, 84.
Thames, river, mudflats at estuary of, 25; its swans
no longer served at table, 73.
Thun, scene of lunar phenomenon: Moon in conjunction
with Venus, 34.
96
Tierra del Fuego, its depressing landscape, 88.
Tunis, reports of judicial proceedings in local press, 28.
Twickenham, unreasonable complaint by female resident
of, 61.
Vienna, exports fragile furniture, 81.
Zug, rarely rimes with "plug," 53.
97