Mungo Park. Bryan Edwards, whose personal interests were opposed to the abolishment of the slavetrade, would not suffer any passage to stand in which the African traveller had expressed his conviction of its inhumanity. Park, among confidential friends, frequently complained that his work did not only not contain his opinions, but was even interpolated with many which he utterly disclaimed !

Suppressed books become as rare as manuscripts. When I was employed in some researches respecting the history of the Mar-prelate faction, that ardent conspiracy against the established Hierarchy, and of which the very name is but imperfectly to be traced in our history, I discovered that the books and manuscripts of the Mar-prelates have been too cautiously suppressed, or too completely destroyed; while those on the other side have been as carefully preserved. In our national collection, the British Museum, we find a great deal against Mar-prelate, but not Mar-prelate himself.

I have written the history of this conspiracy in the third volume of Quarrels of Authors.'

6

PARODIES.

A LADY of bas bleu celebrity (the term is getting odious, particularly to our sçavantes) had two friends, whom she equally admired-an elegant poet and his parodist. She had contrived to prevent their meeting as long as her stratagems lasted, till at length she apologized to the serious bard for inviting him when his mock umbra was to be present. Astonished, she perceived that both men of genius felt a mutual esteem for each other's opposite talent; the ridiculed had perceived no malignity in the playfulness of the parody, and even seemed to consider it as a compliment, aware

that parodists do not waste their talent on obscure productions; while the ridiculer himself was very sensible that he was the inferior poet. The lady-critic had imagined that PARODY must necessarily be malicious; and in some cases it is said those on whom the parody has been performed, have been of the same opinion.

PARODY strongly resembles mimicry, a principle in human nature not so artificial as it appears: Man may be well defined a mimetic animal. The African boy, who amused the whole kafle he journeyed with, by mimicing the gestures and the voice of the auctioneer who had sold him at the slave-market a few days before, could have had no sense of scorn, of superiority, or of malignity; the boy experienced merely the pleasure of repeating attitudes and intonations which had so forcibly excited his interest. The numerous parodies of Hamlet's soliloquy were never made in derision of that solemn monologue, any more than the travesties of Virgil by Scarron and Cotton; their authors were never so gaily mad as that. We have parodies on the Psalms by Luther; Dodsley parodied the book of Chronicles, and the scripture-style was parodied by Franklin in his beautiful story of Abraham; a story he found in Jeremy Taylor, and which Taylor borrowed from the East, for it is preserved in the Persian Sadi. Not one of these writers, however, proposed to ridicule their originals; some ingenuity in the application was all that they intended. The lady-critic alluded to had suffered by a panic, in imagining that a parody was necessarily a corrosive satire. Had she indeed proceeded one step further, and asserted that PARODIES might be classed among the most malicious inventions in literature, when they are such as Colman and Lloyd made on Gray, in their odes to 'Oblivion and Obscurity,' her reading possibly might have supplied the materials of the present research.

PARODIES were frequently practised by the ancients, and with them, like ourselves, consisted of a work grafted on another work, but which turned on a different subject by a slight change of the expressions. It might be a sport of fancy, the innocent child of mirth; or a satirical arrow drawn from the quiver of caustic criticism; or it was that malignant art which only studies to make the original of the parody, however beautiful, contemptible and ridiculous. Human nature thus enters into the composition of parodies, and their variable character originates in the purpose of their application.

There is in the million' a natural taste for farce after tragedy, and they gladly relieve themselves by mitigating the solemn seriousness of the tragic drama; for they find, that it is but a step from the sublime to the ridiculous.' The taste for parody will, I fear, always prevail; for whatever tends to ridicule a work of genius, is usually very agreeable to a great number of contemporaries. In the history of PARODIES, some of the learned have noticed a supposititious circumstance, which, however, may have happened, for it is a very natural one. When the rhapsodists, who strolled from town to town to chant different fragments of the poems of Homer, had recited, they were immediately followed by another set of strollers - buffoons, who made the same audience merry by the burlesque turn which they gave to the solemn strains which had just so deeply engaged their attention. It is supposed that we have one of these travesties of the Iliad in one Sotades, who succeeded by only changing the measure of the verses without altering the words, which entirely disguised the Homeric character; fragments of which, scattered in Dionysius Halicarnassensis, I leave to the curiosity of the learned Grecian. * Homer's battle of

Henry Stephens appears first to have started this subject of parody; his researches have been borrowed by the Abbé Sallier,

the frogs and mice, a learned critic, the elder Heinsius, asserts, was not written by the poet, but is a parody on the poem. It is evidently as good-humoured an one as any in the Rejected Addresses.' And it was because Homer was the most popular poet, that he was most susceptible of the playful honours of the parodist; unless the prototype is familiar to us, a parody is nothing! Of these parodists of Homer we may regret the loss of one, Timon of Philius, whose parodies were termed Silli, from Silenus being their chief personage; he levelled them at the sophistical philosophers of his age; his invocation is grafted on the opening of the Iliad, to recount the evil-doings of those babblers, whom he compares to the bags in which Eolus deposited all his winds; balloons inflated with empty ideas! We should like to have appropriated some of these silli, or parodies of Timon the Sillograph, which, however, seem to have been at times calumnious.* Shenstone's School Mistress,' and some few other ludicrous poems, derive much of their merit from parody.

This taste for parodies was very prevalent with the Grecians, and is a species of humour which perhaps has been too rarely practised by the moderns: Cervantes has some passages of this nature in his parodies of the old chivalric romances; Fielding in some parts of his Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews, in his burlesque poetical descriptions; and Swift in his Battle of Books,' and 'Tale of a Tub;' but few writers have equalled the delicacy and felicity of Pope's parodies

to whom, in my turn, I am occasionally indebted. His little dissertation is in the French Academy's Memoires, Tome vii, 398. * See a specimen in Aulus Gellius, where this parodist reproaches Plato for having given a high price for a book, whence he drew his noble dialogue of the Timæus. Lib. iii, c. 17. 10

VOL. 1. (New Series.)

in the Rape of the Lock.' Such parodies give refinement to burlesque.

The ancients made a liberal use of it in their satirical comedy, and sometimes carried it on through an entire work, as in the Menippean satire, Seneca's mock Eloge of Claudius, and Lucian in his Dialogues. There are parodies even in Plato; and an anecdotical one recorded of this philosopher shows them in their most simple state. Dissatisfied with his own poetical essays, he threw them into the flames; that is, the sage resolved to sacrifice his verses to the god of fire; and in repeating that line in Homer where Thetis addresses Vulcan to implore his aid, the application became a parody, although it required no other change than the insertion of the philosopher's name instead of the goddess's :*

Vulcan, arise! 'tis Plato claims thy aid!'

Boileau affords a happy instance of this simple parody. Corneille, in his Cid, makes one of his personages remark,

'Pour grands que soient les rois ils sont ce que nous sommes, Ils peuvent se tromper comme les autres hommes.'

A slight alteration became a fine parody in Boileau's Chapelain decoiffé,'

6

'Pour grands que soient les rois ils sont ce que nous sommes, Ils se trompent en vers comme les autres hommes.'

We find in Athenæus the name of the inventor of a

*See Spanheim Les Cæsars de l'Empereur Julien in his 'Preuves,' Remarque 8. Sallier judiciously observes, 'Il peut nous donner une juste idée de cette sorte d'ouvrage, mais nous ne savons pas precisement en quel tems il a été composé;' no more truly than the Iliad itself!