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$10 limerick #12

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."

Norman Douglas:
"Kew is famous not for this or any other young lady but for its botanic gardens, which prove what good taste combined with perseverance and scientific knowledge 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 acquainted not only with its flora, but with attractive specimens of its Sunday-afternoon fauna.

"The last line of this poem shows the lady to have been an ignorant one; the lady in the following, I think, would have clung to the curate despite his apparent defects:

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.

"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 unsatisfactory marriages are due to the bare fact that the male partner does not know his business. The copulatory art has to be learnt, like every other, unless we want to remain on the level of the beast. Mere size cannot hope to compete with a rhythmic ritardando con sentimento."

$10 Limerick No.13

Or Take Your Pick:

girl from Kilkenny Sappho of Greece girl of Pitlochry girl of Baroda
man of Peru man of Belgravia Royal Marine lady at sea
man of Devizes man of Australia man called McLean lady of Kew
man of the Cape lady named Skinner man of Kildare man of Cape Horn
Dean of Saint Paul's lady called Wylde student of John's man of Loch Leven