PARODIES
OF
THE WORKS OF
ENGLISH & AMERICAN AUTHORS,
COLLECTED AND ARRANGED BY
WALTER HAMILTON,
Fellow of the Royal Geographical and Royal Historical Societies;
Author of "The Æsthetic Movement in England," "The Poets Laureate of England,"
"A Memoir of George Cruikshank," etc.
INTRODUCTION.
I HAVE, for many years past, been collecting Parodies of the works of the most celebrated British and American Authors. This I have done, not because I entirely approve of the custom of turning high-class work into ridicule, but because many of the parodies are in themselves works of considerable literary merit. Moreover, as "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery," so does a parody show that its original has acquired a certain celebrity, for no author would waste his time, or his talent, in composing a burlesque of an unknown, or obscure work.
Numerous articles on parodies are to be found scattered up and down in odd corners of old magazines and reviews, a few small books have been written on the topic; but, until now, no attempt has been made to give, in a connected form, a history of parody with examples and explanatory notes.
This, then, is what I propose to do in the following articles, and those who desire to possess a complete set of parodies on any favourite author, would do well to preserve these papers for future reference.
PARODY is a form of composition of a somewhat ungracious description, as it owes its very existence to the work it caricatures; but it has some beneficial results in drawing our attention to the defects of some authors, whose stilted language and grandiloquent phrases have veiled their poverty of ideas, their sham sentiment, and their mawkish affectations.