Miss Cary was a pioneer of parody in America and one of the few women writers who have done clever work of this sort. Miss Cary's parodies are numerous and uniformly first-class examples of their kind. They are collected in a small book, now out of print, and are well worth reading.
Of course, parodies which burlesque the actual words of the original are necessarily parodies of some particular poem, and often not so good an imitation of the style of the author.
More difficult than the parody of a particular poem is the imitation or burlesque of the literary style of an author. To accomplish this, the parodist must be himself a master of style, a student of language, and possessed of a power of mimicry with an instant appreciation of opportunities.
“Diversions of the Echo Club," by Bayard Taylor, are among the best of this class of parodies. Aside from their cleverness they are marked by good taste, fairness, justice, and a true poetic instinct.
Naturally, parodies of literary style are founded on the works of those authors whose individual characteristics invite imitation.
Parody is inevitable where sense is sacrificed to sound, where affectations of speech are evident, or where unwarrantable extravagance of any sort is indulged in. This explains the numerous (and usually worthless) parodies of Walt Whitman.
Swinburne and Browning are often parodied for these (perhaps only apparent) reasons, and the poets of the æsthetic school of course offered especially fine opportunities.
Parodies of Rossetti and his followers are often exceedingly funny, though not at all difficult to write, as the originals both in manner and matter fairly invite absurd incongruities.
Nursery Rhymes seem to find favor with the parodists as themes to work upon. A collection of Mother Goose's Melodies as they have been reset by clever pens, would be both large and interesting.
The masters of parody, however, are as a rule to be found among the master poets. Thackeray turned his genius to imitative account; Swinburne parodied himself as well as his fellow-poets; Rudyard Kipling has done some of the best parodies in the language, and C. S. Calverley's burlesques are classics. The work of these writers may be said to be in the third class; for not only do they preserve the diction and style of the author imitated, but they seem to go beyond that, and, assimilating for the moment his very mentality, caricature not only his expressed thoughts but his abstract cerebrations.