Full dress (with decorations) will be worn
When General Officers are shot at dawn.
the Editor wrote cuttingly in the margin, “Do you say dorn?”
The correct answer would have been, of course, “Well, as a matter of fact I do”; but you cannot make answers of that kind to Editors; they don’t understand it. And that brings you to the real drawback of comic poetry; it means constant truck with Editors. But I must not be drawn into a discussion about them. In a special lecture—two special lectures—— Quite.
The lowest form of comic poetry is, of course, the Limerick; but it is a mistake to suppose that it is the easiest. It is more difficult to finish a Limerick than to finish anything in the world. You see, in a Limerick you cannot begin:—
There was an old man of West Ham
and go on
Who formed an original plan.
finishing the last line with limb or hen or bun. A serious writer could do that with impunity, and indeed with praise, but the more exacting traditions of Limerical composition insist that, having fixed on Ham as the end of the first line, you must find two other rhymes to Ham, and good rhymes too. This is why there is so large a body of uncompleted Limericks. For many years I have been trying to finish the following unfinished masterpiece:—
There was a young man who said “Hell!