sink. Oh to be but once again on dry ground; never mind how or in what condition; sh, if I was but in frn iand, with somebody bicking me."

But I must get out of the company of Rabelais, or I shall never see land in this essay. The above is a hasty specimen of the sort of abridgment which I think might be made of this immortal jester; and after the fashion of the disinterestedness which he and other scholars have taught me, I here make a present of the notion to the booksellers. It is good to be brought up in the company of the cheerinl

PARODY Пzpučia, Sule-song ?—song turned from its purpose is sometimes pure burlesque, and sometimes a species of compËmental irony, hovering between burlesque and mock-heroic. Dr. King's Art of Cookery, quoted in the foregoing section, is a parody on Horace's Art of Poetry, and commences like its original with remarks on the fault of ineongruity :

Ingenious Lister, were a picture drawn

With Cynthia's face, but with a neck like brawn,

With wings of turkey, and with feet of calf.

Though drawn by Kneller, it would make you laugh.

I do not think it would, any more than the like monstrosity in Horace. It would be simply shock

* This extract is abridged from two different editions of the cariorum Tunsiation of Rabelais; or rather, the concluding passage is added, and quoted from memory, out of the one I first met with : which I take to be the best.

ing. But the rest is good, both as to books and dishes).

Such is, good sir, the figure of a feast

By some rich farmer's wife and sister drest;
Which, were it not for plenty and for steam,
Might be resembled to a sick man's dream,
Where all ideas huddling run so fast,
That syllabubs come first, and soups the last.
Not but that cooks and poets still were free
To use their power in nice variety;
Hence, mackerel seem delightful to the eyes,
Though dress'd with incoherent gooseberries:
Crabs, salmon, lobsters, are with fennel spread,
Who never touch'd that herb till they were dead:
Yet no man lards salt pork with orange-peel,
Or garnishes his lamb with spitch-cock'd eel.

Parody is not only a compliment instead of a satire, as some people think it, but a compliment greater than it is thought by others, for it is a greater test of merit. Sometimes it is so close, yet amusing, as to become almost identical; in which case it betrays the existence of something too much like itself in the original; that is to say, unintentionally subject to a derisive echo. Mr. Crabbe, an acute though not impartial observer of common life, a versifier of singular facility, and a genuine wit, had nevertheless a style so mixed up with conventionalisms and antithetical points, that the happy parody of him in the Rejected Addresses seems almost identical with what he himself would have written on the same theatrical subject, not intending to

make so much game of it. The parody is like the echo of an eccentric langh.

John Richard William Alexander Dryer
Was footman to Justinian Stubbs. Esquire:
But when John Dwyer listed in the Blues,
Emanusi Iruninos polish'è Stubl`s shots.
Emanuel Jennings brought his younger boy
Up as a corn-cutter, a safe employ

Pat was the urchin's name, a red-har'ċ youth.
Ponder qa`pus, and skittle grommās than truth.
Backs with pockets empty as their pate,

Las in ther gaiters, lærer n. ther poi..

The Splendid Shilling (see it in the present volume) is an excellent parody of the style of Milton. So is Isaac Hawkins Browne's Dine or Tobacco, of the styles of Pope and Ambrose Philips

Come let me taste thee, warris à gìmo

and (alluding to an anti-climax in Pope's praise of Murray

Persuasion hrs his tongue whence de nuis

And he has dozenges in the King's Rack Falls

But Parody, 1 think, sooner pals upon the reader than most kinds of Wit. In truth, it is very easy; and, in long istanas, tresome from its easiness, sometimes from is vulgarity. I remember m my youth rying in vain to read Cottor's T-aTepi li rorolted me with is coarseness. I resined, andy the fallowing fom mäiferent

Thus spoke this Trojan heart of oak,

And thundered through the gate like smoke :
His brother Paris followed close,

Resolv'd to give the Greeks a dose.

There is some excellent parody, however, in Beaumont and Fletcher's Knight of the Burning Pestle, in the Duke of Buckingham's Rehearsal, Sheridan's Critic, and Fielding's Tom Thumb, particularly, I think, the last. It has more gaiety as well as goodnature than the other satires.

The speech of Tom Thumb, when desired by the king to name his reward for the victories he has gained him, is a banter on the high flights in the plays of Dryden and others, some of which are literally given

King. Oh Thumb, what do we to thy valour owe?

Ask some reward, great as we can bestow,

Thumb. I ask not kingdoms;—I can conquer those ;

I ask not money ;—money I've enough.

For what I've done, and what I mean to do,

For giants slain, and giants yet unborn,
Which I will slay,-if this be called a debt,
Take my receipt in full :-I ask but this,—
To sun myself in Huncamunca's eyes.
(Huncamunca is the princess royal.)

King. (aside) Prodigious bold request!

And the simile of the Dogs is too good to omit, for the solemnity of its triviality, and the stately monosyllabic stamp of its music:

So when two dogs are fighting in the streets,
With a third dog one of the two dogs meets;

("Dogs meets" is an exquisite hiss, and punning intimation)

With angry tooth he bites him to the bone;

And THIS dog smarts for what THAT dog had done.

This simile reminds me of a happy one of poor Kit Smart, in whom a good deal of real genius seems to have wasted itself away in complexional weakness. I quote it from memory :—

Thus when a barber and a collier fight,

The barber beats the luckless collier white;

In comes the brick-dustman with rouge bespread,
And beats the barber and the collier red;

The rallying collier whirls his empty sack,

And beats the brick-dustman and barber black :
Black, white, and red in various clouds are toss'd,

And in the dust they raise the combatants are lost.

Dr. Johnson's mimicry of the simple style of the old ballads is good:

As with my hat upon my head

I walk'd along the Strand,

1 there did meet another man

With his hat in his hand.

Nevertheless this jost is an edifying instance of a wit's not being always aware of the beauty contained in what he parodies. Johnson would have heen fifty times the "poet" he was, had he been alive to the simplicity which he saw only in its abuso,

fith, Froggeration, Ultra-Continuity, and Extravagance in Generals. Those honds might be thought to