PARNELL 



PARODY 



781 



self for his country's good. After some days of 

 profitless and heated wrangling the majority ended 

 the discussion by leaving the room and electing 

 Justin M'Carthy'as their chairman. Parnell, with 

 the shattered remnants of his party, now carried the 

 warfare into Ireland ; but his condemnation by the 

 Church and the emphatic defeat of his nominees at 

 by-elections foretokened the complete collapse of 

 his party at the general election of 1892, when 

 seventy-two Anti-Parnellites were returned as 

 against but nine who claimed his name and the 

 succession to his policy. For the great discredited 

 and discrowned leader had died suddenly at 

 Brighton, 6th October 1891, but five months after 

 his marriage to Mrs O'Shea. ParnelPs command- 

 ing personality might have made defeat less dis- 

 astrous, but could hardly have prevailed against 

 the strong conviction forced on Nationalists- and 

 English Home Rulers alike, that lie had fatally 

 confounded personal ambition with patriotism. 



See R. Barry O'Brien'8 Life of Charles Stevmrt Parnell 

 (2 vola. 1898), and vol. v. of Justin M'Carthy's History 

 of Our Own Times ( 1897 ). 



Parn*ll, THOMAS, a minor Queen Anne poet, 

 born in Dublin in 1679, son of a commonwealth's 

 man who at the Restoration left Congleton in 

 Cheshire for Ireland. He had his education at 

 Trinity College, took orders, and in 1705 received 

 the archdeaconry of Clogher, later a prebend from 

 Archbishop King and the vicarage of Finglass. 

 The head of an English family settled in Ireland, 

 with property both in that country and in Cheshire, 

 he spent most of his time in London, where his wit 

 procured him the friendship of Harley, Swift, and 

 Pope, and opened to him the Scrililerus Club. Dr 

 Johnson tells us that his well-timed change of 

 politics coincided with the ejection of the Whigs 

 in the end of Queen Anne's reign. After his wife's 

 ilratli lie took to drinking, and died at Chester in 

 October 1718, while on his way to Ireland. Next 

 year Pope published a selection of his poems, 

 mostly translations or adaptations, with the merit 

 at least of being ever smooth and easy in versifi- 

 cation. -The best known of his poems is the 

 Hi-milt, a polished and harmonious poem, based 

 upon a tale in the Gcsta Romanormn. Still better 

 as poetry, however, are the two remarkable odes, 

 the Night-piece and the Hymn to Contentment. 

 See the admirable Life by Goldsmith, reprinted in 

 the Globe edition of Goldsmith's works (1881). 



Parody, a burlesque and consciously exag- 

 gerated imitation of a serious poem, the words of 

 which should strike the ear with the very echo of 

 the original. So to parody a writer is obviously to 

 pay a compliment to his popularity, and at the 

 outset we may admit the truth of Shaftesbury's 

 paradox that 'a subject which will not bear raillery 

 W suspicious,' provided it be not taken to mean 

 that ridicule is to l>e the test of truth. The making 

 of parodies is a harmless amusement, and moreover 

 they may be an effective means of exposing weak- 

 ness and affectation ; but it must never be for- 

 gotten that, as there are, says Bacon, certain things 

 to be privileged from jest, so there is a region of 

 poetry into which this form of imitation may not 

 enter. And, apart altogether from their subject, 

 there are some poems so unapproachably beautiful 

 in mere form and melody that to attempt a parody 

 is a sin. Yet there are fools of such obliquity of 

 vision and darkened understanding that they will 

 rush in to tread even upon holy ground and try 

 to wring a jest out of anything. For example, 

 Sir Charles Hanbury Williams Old England's 

 Te Denm is a form or merriment altogether to be 

 disallowed, as are also the Mock Litanies and Visi- 

 tations of Sick Parliaments of Puritan times, and 

 those three indifferent performances of Hone, mag- 



nified in 1817 by the foolishness of persecution into 

 ' impious, profane, and scurrilous libels." 



To show any reason for its existence a parody 

 must be very good, its subject legitimately within 

 the range of the comic, itself skilful as an" adapta- 

 tion of a well-known original, and that original 

 neither too good to be above, nor too bad to be 

 beneath, ridicule. Its highest end is to emphasise 

 by the exaggeration of caricature some mannerism 

 or trick of metre ; its surest success depends on a 

 felicity in catching the flow of some familiar and 

 favourite rhythm. It is true that thoroughly to en- 

 joy a parody must detract a little from our pleas- 

 ure in the original ; yet no parody will please which 

 is not genial and human, the child at once of appreci- 

 ation and knowledge. At its highest, as in Calver- 

 ley, it flows from a quite unusual combination of 

 delicacy, creative imagination, and faculty for imi- 

 tation, added to a dexterous mastery of rhythms. 

 Jeffrey, in his review of the famous Rejected 

 Addresses, distinguishes between the mere imita- 

 tion of externals and that higher and rarer art 

 which brings before us the intellectual character- 

 istics of the original. Of the latter order a diligent 

 search has discovered but few English examples, 

 amid the thousands of Mr Walter Hamilton's six 

 bulky volumes. 



The name parody is due to the Greeks, and the 

 first parodist, according to Aristotle, was Hegemon 

 of Thasos, whose parody of the Gigantoinachia 

 made the Athenians forget for a moment even 

 their disasters in Sicily. Others ascribe its origin 

 to Hipponax, a comic poet, who flourished about 

 540 B.C. The well-known Katrachmnyamachia, or 

 Battle of the Frogs and Mice, is an ancient mock- 

 heroic epos ; and there is 'extant, preserved in 

 Athenreiis, a fragment of several hundred lines by 

 Matron, on an Attic banquet, in which each dish 

 is introduced with epic solemnity after the manner 

 of Homer. The comedies of Aristophanes contain 

 many subtle touches of sarcastic banter belong- 

 ing more or less definitely to this order, and 

 we Jinil^a further development in the hexameter 

 Si Hi of Tinion of Phlius. Among the Romans we 

 first meet this form of literature in the period of 

 decline. The first satire of Persius is interspersed 

 with numerous parodies on the most popular poems 

 of the day, but there seems no adequate evidence 

 for the assertion that the most severe of these were 

 aimed at the verses of Nero. In France the bur- 

 lesques of Scarron ( Virgile travcslie) and Dassoucy 

 created a taste which Boileau and others strove to 

 counteract, and were imitated in England by 

 Charles Cotton and John Philips in his Splendid 

 Shilling a vastly overrated outrage on Para- 

 dise Lost. Of modern English parodies some of 

 the most felicitous examples are to be found in 

 the Rejected Addresses, full of clever and genial 

 satire unblemished by vulgarity, of which its 

 authors could say that of the twelve poets imitated 

 ' not one ever betrayed the least soreness or refused 

 to join in the laugh that we had occasioned.' 

 The Bon Gaultier Ballads, by Aytoun and 

 Sir T. Martin, contain six admirable imitations 

 professing to be by the unsuccessful candidates for 

 the laureateship on the death of Southey. There 

 are some exquisite examples in the two classical 

 children's books of Lewis Carroll, but no parodies 

 can be compared with those to be found in 

 C. S. Calverley's Verses and Translations and 

 Fly Leaves. Of these it is enough merely to 

 name 'The Cock and the Bull,' and 'Lovers, 

 and A Reflection ' as masterpieces of the art. 

 Seven clever imitations of as many leading poets 

 of the day, including the reputed' writer himself 

 [A. C. Swinburne), were published anonymously as 

 The Heptaloqia, or the Seven ayainst Sense (1880). 

 Among elaborate prose parodies most famous 



