I'm drowning; I drown; I'm a dead man, my dear father in God; I'm a dead man, my friend; your valor cannot save me from this; alas! alas! we're above E la (a term in music), above the pitch, out of tune, and off the hinges. Be, be, be, bous. Alas! we're above G Sol Re Ut. I sink, I sink, my father, my uncle, my all. The water's got into me. I pash it in my shoes-bous, bous, bous, pash-I drown-alas! alas! hu, hu, hu, hu, bous, bous, bobous, ho, ho, alas! Would to Heaven I were in company with those good holy fathers we met this morning going to council, -so godly, so comely, so fat and happy, my friend. Holos, holos, holos, alas! ah, see there! This devilish wave (God forgive me) I mean this wave of Providence, will sink our vessel Alas, Friar John, my father, my friend;-confess me. I'm down on my knees. I confess my sinsyour blessing."

"Go to the devil," said Friar John; "will you never leave off whining and snivelling? Come and help us."

"Don't swear," said Panurge, "don't swear, holy father, my friend, I beseech you. To-morrow as much as you please. I drown. I'll give eighteen hundred thousand crowns to any one that will set me on shore. Oh, my dear friend, I confess: hear me confess: a little bit of a will or testament at any rate."

"His will!" said Friar John. "Stir your stumps, now or never, you pitiful rascal. The poor devil's frightened out of his wits."

"Bous, bous, bous," continued Panurge. "I sink; I die, my friends. I die in charity with all the world. Farewell. Bous, bous, bousowwanwaus. St. Michael! St. Nicholas! now or never. Deliver me from this danger, and I here make a solemn vow to build you a fine large little chapel or two between Condé and Monsoreau, where neither cow nor calf shall feed. Oh, oh! pailfuls are getting down my throat-bous, bous. How devilish bitter and salt it is! Oh, you sinn'd just now, Friar John, you did indeed; you sinn'd when you swore; think of that, my FORMER CRONY! former, I say, because it's all over with us; with you as well as with me. Oh, I sink, I sink. Oh to be but once again on dry ground; never mind how or in what condition; oh, if I was but on firm land, with somebody kicking 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

* This extract is abridged from two different editions of the variorum translation 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.

notion to the booksellers. It is good to be brought up in the company of the cheerful.

PARODY (Пlapadia, Side-song?-song turned from its purpose) is sometimes pure burlesque, and sometimes a species of complimental 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 incongruity :

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 shocking. 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 laugh.

John Richard William Alexander Dwyer
Was footman to Justinian Stubbs, Esquire ;
But when John Dwyer listed in the Blues,
Emmanuel Jennings polish'd Stubbs's shoes.
Emmanuel Jennings brought his younger boy
Up as a corn-cutter, a safe employ ;—
Pat was the urchin's name, a red-hair'd youth,
Fonder of purl and skittle grounds than truth,
Backs with pockets empty as their pate,

Lax in their gaiters, laxer in their gait.

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

Come let me taste thee, unexcis'd of kings

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

Persuasion tips his tongue whene'er he talks,

And he has lodgings in the King's Bench Walks.

But Parody, I think, sooner palls upon the reader than most kinds of Wit. In truth, it is very easy; and, in long instances, tiresome from its easiness, sometimes from its vulgarity. I remember in my youth trying in vain to read Cotton's Travestie of Virgil. It revolted me with its coarseness. I retained only the following four indifferent lines:

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 Buck

ingham's Rehearsal, Sheridan's Critic, and Fielding's Tom Thumb, particularly, I think, the last. It has more gaiety as well as good nature 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 valor 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,
I there did meet another man
With his hat in his hand.

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

6th. Exaggeration, Ultra-Continuity, and Extravagance in General. These heads might be thought to belong to the preceding section; but there is generally satire in Burlesque, which is not perhaps the case with Exaggeration. You may exaggerate in order to eulogize, and sincerely too; the excess in that case being but the representation of the good spirits and gratitude with which you do it, and an intimation that justice is not to be done niggardly. Thus Falstaff, himself an exaggeration, overflows both in praise and blame. Love exaggerates as well as spleen. Everything exaggerates which has a natural tendency to make the best or the worst of what it feels. We "feed fat a grudge:" we pamper a predilection. The voluptuous is the expatiatory and the continuous. “Another bottle," makes its appearance, because the last was one too much, and it is three in the morning. But in regard to Wit and Humor, it must be confessed that Exaggeration is generally on the side of objection, though seldom illnaturedly. When otherwise, it becomes revolting, and defeats its purpose. Ben Jonson's attacks on Inigo Jones are not so good as his Epicure Mammon. The two best pieces of comic exaggeration I am acquainted with (next to whole poems like Hudibras) are the Descriptions of Holland by the author of that poem, and Andrew Marvel. The reader will find passages of them in the present volume. Holland and England happened to be great enemies in the time of Charles the Second, and the wits were always girding at the Dutchmen and their "ditch." Butler calls them a people