The Dogs of Doggerel.

Tolerance is Imagination with the lining turned outwards, or a fellow-feeling derived from the bumps of experience. Britain, whose history is studded with more excavations and pit-falls than the average city thoroughfare, owes her bigness to her bruises. Decorated with doggerel the situation is something adjacent to the following:—

Let carping critics cease to sniff,
And use their “beans” for half a jiff,
And from the jug of reason swig
The reason why the nation's big,
And why from ev'ry sort of stew,
Our native land has blundered through.
The dog who harbours fleas is rich
In knowledge as to canine itch,
And bears a sympathetic wheeze
For other dogs who harbour fleas.
A lack of fleas must always tend,
To harden him from end to end.
In fact a dog without a flea
Is lacking in that sympathy
That brands all meanness “infra dig,”
And makes some dogs and nations big.