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 mimicking 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 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 farther, 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