macaronics

Forced to make do on a meager three pounds of potatoes a week during the long nights of rationing, patient Britons could find small comfort in the advice of the great epistler, but last week a clutch of lesser literary lights were doing their best to make up for Britain's lack of spuds with a bumper crop of digestible macaronics.

Only a competent classical scholar can write good macaronics; only a good poet can write clever doggerel.

We find them in the Macaronics of Merlin Coccaius, and in scores of older authorities.

The only loophole left by which a realistic treatment could find its way into pastoral was when, as in Folengo's macaronics, it was not the actual rustic life but the conventional representation of it that was the object of satire.

His theory was, that as Macaronics were the ultra-extravagance of poetry, he who wrote most recklessly in them did best; in fact, that they should excel in first-rate BADNESS; and from this point of view it is possible that Breitmann's Latin lyric is not devoid of merit, since assuredly nobody ever wrote a worse.