10 JANUARY 1998, Page 23

Limerick completed

Sir: I am reluctant to take issue with such an eminent fellow Antipodean as Mr Humphries (Diary, 20/27 December), but I must point out that the 'unfinished' limer- ick which he attributes to Noel Coward is, in fact, an entire limerick by Aldous Huxley. The complete limerick is:

There was a young girl of East Anglia Whose loins were a tangle of ganglia. Her mind was a webbing Of Freud and Krafft-Ebing And all other sorts of new fanglia.

I believe that Huxley was also responsible for the limerick about the young fellow from Burma whose betrothed had good reason to murmur.

Mary-Jane Bosch

26 Ellerslie Crescent, Taringa, Brisbane, Australia