Parodies and Imitations Old and New

which was the approved way to talk of the weather or of Dr. Jenner's vaccine. On the other hand, at the beginning of a tale he would bump for twenty or thirty lines together upon a Scylla commonplace so bald and awkward that James Smith's famous lines contain more of criticism than of exaggeration :

John Richard William Alexander Dwyer
Was footman to Justinian Stubbs, Esquire;
But when John Dwyer 'listed in the Blues,
Emanuel Jennings polish'd Stubbs's shoes.
Emanuel Jennings brought his youngest boy
Up as a corn-cutter—a safe employ, etc.

This is fun and criticism together; and as criticism it indicates at once Crabbe's "worsted stockings " and his frequent, almost habitual clumsiness in starting them out for a walk.

Again, could the fatuity of the ordinary Prize Poem be better rationalised in twenty pages of prose than it was by the parodist who summarised all the Oxford Newdigates in one line?—

What though no cenotaph enshrine thy bones!

Or, again, has the banality of poetic diction ever received a shrewder knock than it did from the parodies of the Anti-Jacobin?

The feather'd tribes on pinions cleave the air

Not so the mackerel, and, still less, the bear, etc.

Or yet, again, could the musical flagrancies of our latest and greatest Strauss, and the affabilities of all the eighteenth-century Odes to Saint Cecilia, be more neatly touched than they are by Mr. Charles L. Graves simply opposing them in an

ODE TO DISCORD

Hence, loathéd Melody, whose name recalls
The mellow fluting of the nightingale

In some sequester'd vale,

The Murmur of the stream
Heard in a dream,

Or drowsy plash of distant waterfalls.
But thou, divine Cacophony, assume
The rightful overlordship in her room,
And with Percussion's stimulating aid

Expel the heavenly but no longer youthful maid.

The mischief with Parody is that while no neater or swifter vehicle of criticism has ever been invented, the most of men practise it in youth, as a way of breaking their teeth upon literature, and abandon it as middle age brings the critical judgment which it would seem designed to convey. There once was an Aristophanes to whom years but brought fresh gusto in the gentle art and our own times have in England, in Mr. Owen Seaman, a parodist who has steadily followed up the art to something as near perfection as our language is likely to achieve-for his first living rival, Mr. A.

G. Godley, is an Horatian rather than a parodist, and indeed his line has lain in that direction from the first. Calverley, Hilton of The Light Green, J. K. Stephen, all died young. Perhaps the gods loved them. For, as I said at the start, Parody plays with the gods; and, as George Meredith says in his Essay on Comedy—and we may reverently apply it to the gods-"You may estimate your capacity for Comic perception by being able to detect the ridicule of them you love, without loving them less and more by being able to see yourself somewhat ridiculous in dear eyes, and accepting the correction their image of you proposes."

ARTHUR QUILLER-COUCH.