tention of organising a good rhyme for _bid_--or perhaps for
_shed_--but he found this was more difficult than he expected. And
then, no doubt, somebody drove all his cattle on to his croquet-lawn,
or somebody else's croquet-lawn, and he abandoned the struggle.
I shouldn't complain of that; what I do complain of is the
_deceitfulness_ of the whole thing. If a man can't find a better rhyme
than _shed_ for a simple word like _bid_, let him give up the idea of
having a rhyme at all; let him write--

Hands, do as you're TOLD,

or

Into its narrow HUT (or even HANGAR).

That at least would be an honest confession of failure. But to write
_bid_ and _shed_ is simply a sinister attempt to gain credit for
writing a rhymed poem _without doing it at all_.

Well, that kind of thing is not allowed in comic poetry. When I opened
my well-known military epic, "Riddles of the King," with the couplet,

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!_
I don't think I feel very well----"

That was composed on the Gallipoli Peninsula; in fact it was composed
under fire; indeed I remember now that we were going over the top at
the time. But in the q