Ingelow, and whether he looses his shaft at a particular poem or (which is more difficult) at the characteristic style of the writer, the result has that spontaneous ease which is essential in a really excellent parody. His playful specimen of Browning, who loved "to dock the smaller parts of speech," gives a capital burlesque idea of the galvanic jerks and disconnected utterance of the author of "Sludge the Medium."

I once did hitch the syntax into verse: Verbum personale, a verb personal, Concordat-ay, “agrees,” old Fatchaps

-сит

Nominativo-with its nominative,
Genere, i' point o' gender, numero

O' number, et persona, and person. Ut, Instance; Sol ruit, down flops sun, et, and,

Montes umbrantur, out flounce moun

tains. Pah!

Excuse me. sir, I think I'm going mad. You see the trick on't, though, and can yourself

Continue the discourse ad libitum.

His Tennysonian deliverance takes the likeness of the "Brook"

I loiter down by thorp and town;
For any job I'm willing;
Take here and there a dusty brown,
And here and there a shilling.

Tennyson, as might be expected of one who was so long the foremost poet of his day, has had his share of burlesque imitators. Some of his shorter poems, being on everybody's lips, have provoked such treatment by reason of their excessive popularity. Of the most notable example, "The Charge of the Light Brigade," there are probably a score of versions, good, bad, and indifferent; even the enterprising advertiser has smiled and marked it for his own. "The Queen of the May" runs it very close, one version of the poem by

Aytoun appearing with other parodies in the "Bon Gaultier Ballads":

You may lay me in my bed, mother, my head is throbbing sore, And, prithee, mother, let the sheets be duly aired before;

And if you'd do a kindness to your poor desponding child, Draw me a pint of beer, mother-and, mother, draw it mild.

"Home they brought her Warrior dead," "Break, break, break," and other characteristic examples have met the same fate.

Swinburne in his "Heptalogia, or the Seven against Sense" has parodied some of his brother poets, and he himself has not lacked evidences of that humorous imitation which may or may not be a mark of sincere flattery. To those who regard "Atalanta in Calydon" as one of the finest of the master's poems, the title of Lewis Carroll's version-"Atalanta in Camden Town" -is calculated to come as a painful surprise; but the parodists have, as a rule, contented themselves with imitating one of his favorite measures, a swinging metre that carries the reader breathlessly forward till he almost forgets to interest himself in the sentiments he is uttering in the fascination cast over him by the rush of the galloping accents. In this connection it is rather startling to come across one of the Rejected Addresses beginning

Sobriety cease to be sober,

Cease labor to dig and to delve, All hail to this tenth of October One thousand eight hundred and twelve

One almost looks to see "by A. C. S." at the top, and learns, with some surprise, that the verses are supposed to be by the Hon. W. Spencer, whose name evokes no poetical recollections. A more authentic Swinburnian attempt

is Mortimer Collins's receipt for making salad, which begins

Oh! cool in the summer is salad, And warm in the winter is love.

One verse may be quoted in full:

Take endive, like love it is bitter,

Take beet, for like love it is red, Crisp leaf of the lettuce shall glitter, And cress from the rivulet's bed; Anchovies, foam-born, like the lady Whose beauty has maddened this bard,

And olives from groves that are shady, And eggs-boil 'em hard.

In Q.'s volume there is also a clever Oxford travesty "by A. C. S." on the unity of ancient and modern literature. It is far too long to quote, but the first stanza will give a good notion of its alliterative murmuring facility:

The centuries kiss and commingle, Cling, clasp, and are knit in a chain; No cycle but scorns to be single,

No two but demur to be twain,

Till the land of the lute and the love tale

Be bride of the boreal breast, And the dawn with the darkness shall dovetail,

The East with the West.

The same writer gives an admirable parody on "The Bells," a more trite theme, it is true, but one to which he gives, in a double sense, an air of freshness by its undergraduate setting; the inclination to quote further from his book must, however, not be indulged.

As we have already said, those parodies in which a particular poem is singled out for humorous treatment are much easier than those which have a more general application. In the first case the writer has, so to speak, a framework ready to hang his lines on; he can check his progress at frequent intervals by the model of whose features he is making a distorted copy;

he has most of his material to his hand; his art is more mechanical and has less of originality. A parody has been defined as a "consciously exaggerated imitation of a serious poem, the words of which should strike the ear with the very echo of the original," which definition apparently assumes that the object of ridicule will be one individual set of verses. Here is an extract from Calverley which falls in with this definition:

I never had a dear gazelle;

But I was given a parroquetHow I did nurse him if unwell! He's imbecile, but lingers yet.

He's green with an enchanting tuft; He melts me with his small black eye;

He'd look inimitably stuffed,

And knows it-but he will not die.

But, like most attempts to define, it does not cover the whole ground; for clearly it is possible to make fun of an author's style without hitching the parody on to any of his works, and it is obvious that, as a rule, such a proceeding is the more difficult because one has "to strike the ear with the very echo of the original" without making use of the very sound of the original. Occasionally it becomes difficult in such a case to know whether the result be a real parody at all, or merely an imitation. The Byron burlesque in "Rejected Addresses" is a case in point. The public of 1812, who bought the volume so eagerly, may have seen greater possibilities of laughter in "Cui Bono? by Lord B," than are patent to the reader now, for, to the present writer at least, the effort seems singularly pointless.

Ye reckless dupes who hither wend

your way

To gaze on puppets in a painted dome, Pursuing pastimes glittering to betray, Like falling stars in life's eternal gloom,

What seek ye here? Joy's evanescent

bloom?

Woe's me! the brightest wreaths she ever gave

Are but as flowers that decorate a tomb;

Man's heart, the mournful urn o'er which they wave,

Is sacred to despair, its pedestal the grave.

This is one of the stanzas, and to call a collection of such verses a parody of Byron is to have a mistaken idea of the term; it is only an imitation-and a poor one.

stanza

Byron's own "Vision of Judgment" is itself a travesty of Southey's Vision, not of the ordinary imitative kind-for while Southey's work is in hexameters, Byron's is in the octave but of the broader, more elastic variety. Professor Nichol, in his life of Byron in the "English Men of Letters" series, declares with a biographer's fondness that the "Iliad" is not more surely the first of epics, nor the "Pilgrim's Progress" the first of allegories, than the "Vision of Judgment" is the first of parodies, and he follows up this rather sweeping assertion with a sentence of praise which, by its extraordinary agglomeration of metaphors, runs perilously near burlesque itself. It would be hard, in so few lines, to assemble a finer assortment of images. After premising that the execution of the work is almost perfect, he adds: "From first to last every epithet hits the white; every line that does not convulse with laughter stings or lashes. It rises to greatness by the fact that underneath all its lambent buffoonery it is aflame with religious wrath." A work which, apparently at the same moment, can shoot, convulse, sting, lash and flame, is surely entitled to no niggard praise. Though not parodies pure and simple, but rather to be classed under the head of burlesque (though the two divisions overlap at several points), there are a

few well-known dramatic pieces of which mention should be made before leaving the subject. Of these the first is "The Knight of the Burning Pestle," by Beaumont and Fletcher, a comedy intended (as was "Don Quixote") to draw down laughter upon the old heroic romances. The style of this parody may be inferred from the burlesque description of a barber:

Without his door doth hang A copper bason on a prickant spear; At which no sooner gentle knight can knock

But the shrill sound fierce Barbarossa hears,

And rushing forth brings in the errant knight

And sets him down in an enchanted chair;

Then with an engine which he hath prepared

With forty teeth he claws his courtly

crown.

The play is not particularly funny to read; perhaps the authors were conscious of something like this, for in the prologue they state that it was their intent "to move inward delight, not outward lightness; and to breed (if it might be) soft smiling, not loud laughing." There is no danger of its exciting loud laughter nowadays; and, if one may judge from the reception it met with at the hands (and teeth) of the contemporary audience, there never was; in spite of the assertion that the authors "never aimed at any one particular," the public rejected it, "not understanding the privy mask of irony about it."

In the "Midsummer Night's Dream," Shakespeare had a similar fling at the high-flown romances of his predecessors, and he himself did not escape equal treatment from his antagonist Marston.

The "Rehearsal" is better known and more interesting to read than Beaumont and Fletcher's play. It is a very

entertaining, though rather disconnected, farce, in which the little scraps of literal parody scattered about are not so good as the general inclusive ridicule thrown upon the rhyming, ranting, heroic plays then in vogue. The list of the plays parodied in the course of the piece is a long one, and any one who finds interest in such matters has plenty of information and plenty of suggestion for further research in the published keys to its allusions. The absurdity of the pretentious warlike preparations, strategical directions, combinations, encounters, alarums and excursions are beautifully caricatured in the events that befell the two Kings of Brentford:

The army's at the door, and in disguise.

This is strongly suggestive of the "Critic," and there is not much doubt that for his wonderfully witty play Sheridan was largely indebted to the committee who were responsible for the "Rehearsal." There is no key to the "Critic" to enable the ordinary reader to understand all the references to particular passages in the contemporary plays on whose weak places Sheridan laid his exposing finger, and there are probably few students who care to burrow into the dramatic writings of that age for the purpose of discovering those defects which have been made the source of so much entertainment. It is far more amusing to read the "Critic" than to read the works of Sir Fretful Plagiary, and while the numerous dusty volumes of Cumberland and his allies have slowly taken the road towards a safe oblivion the little farce constructed at their expense has attained the dignity of an English classic.

Less known than either of these immortal burlesques are Fielding's "Tom Thumb," and the "Crononhotonthologus" of Henry Carey. "Tom Thumb" is a parody of the romantic drama of

the early part of the eighteenth century, much as the "Critic" was of those of the later part. Fielding's "Joseph Andrews" was designed to burlesque Richardson's "Pamela," SO "Tom Thumb" is not his only essay in that field. Carey is chiefly known as a song-writer, to most people only as the author of "Sally in our Alley," but he was the writer of many pieces for the stage, and his "Crononhotonthologus," "the most tragical tragedy ever tragedized by any company of tragedians," is really a very happy little extravaganza. In the prologue he tells us that his muse

Struts in heroics, and in pompous verse Does the minutest incidents rehearse; In ridicule's strict retrospect displays The poetasters of these modern days Who, with big, bellowing bombast, rend our ears.

He carries out this intention in a short, mock-heroic piece full of humorously-tragic episodes. One of the characters labors under a name full five feet long, the first line of the play being entirely monopolized by this unwieldy appellation:

Aldiborontiphoscophornio,

Where left you Crononhotonthologus?

Aldi. Fatigued with the tremendous toils of war,

Within his tent on downy couch

succumbent

Himself he unfatigues with

gentle slumbers;

Lulled by the cheerful trumpet's gladsome clangor,

The noise of drums and thunder

of artillery,

He sleeps supine amid the din of

war.

It appears, however, that the King is not so fortunate as his courtier would suppose, for presently he enters, declaiming against the god of sleep:

Bomb.

Then go to t'other world and fetch it back.

Sport not with Crononhotonthologus, Thou idle slumberer, thou detested Somnus!

For if thou dost, by all the waking powers,

I'll tear thine eyeballs from their leaden sockets

And force thee to outstare eternity. (Exit in a huff.)

Hysterical rant of this kind might seem altogether wide of the mark as parody, were not passages of almost equal absurdity to be found in the pages of Lee and Dryden. The last scene of this tragical tragedy is very amusing, and our last extract shall be taken from it. The King is dining with his general-in-chief, and is offered hashed pork. The impious notion that he should "be fed on swine's flesh and at second hand," naturally angers him, and in his rage he kills the cook and strikes his host. The latter draws and slays the King; then, overcome by the enormity of his act, he cries:

Ha! What have I done?

Go, call a coach! And let a coach be called!

And let the man that calls it be the caller!

And in his calling let him nothing call But "Coach! coach! coach!" Oh, for a coach, ye Gods!

(Exit, raving.)

Returns with a Doctor.

Bomb. How fares your Majesty?
Doctor.
My Lord, he's dead.
Bomb. Ha! Dead! Impossible! It can-
not be!

I'd not believe it, though him-
self should swear it.

Go join his body to his soul again,

Or, by this light, thy soul shall quit thy body. Doctor. My Lord, he's far beyond the power of physic,

His soul has left his body and this world.

(Kills him.)

And if I find thou triflest with me there,

I'll chase thy shade through myriads of orbs,

And drive thee far beyond the
Verge of Nature.
Ha!-Call'st thou, Crononho-
tonthologus?

I come! Your faithful Bombardinian comes!

He comes in Worlds unknown to make new wars, And gain thee empires numerous as the stars.

(Kills himself.)

Enter Queen and Others.

Aldi. O horrid! horrible, and horridest horror!

Our King! our General! our

Cook! our Doctor!

All dead! Stone dead! Irrevocably dead!

Oh!

(All groan, a tragedy groan.)

The burlesque is not a long one, and it still retains its vitality. The reader who is unacquainted with it may look forward to spending a very pleasant hour among its bloated personages and timid talk, and if the quotations here made induce him to turn to the play itself he will find there plenty to reward him for his trouble.

If something more recent than Carey is required, we have a modern parodist in Mr. Owen Seaman, whose "Battle of the Bays" brings us down to Sir Edwin Arnold, Le Gallienne, John Davidson, Alfred Austin and Kipling. The poet of "The Seven Seas" has not often been better hit off than in "The Rhyme of the Kipperling," a tale full of "sailorman" expressions hopelessly confused and prefaced by an author's note "No nautical terms or statements guaranteed." Kipling's vivid direct