Were the Furies and Fates,
And a delicate map
Of the Dorian States;
And they found on his palms, which were dirty,
What is frequent on palms—that is dates—[19]
we entirely acquit the writer of any design to laugh at Mr. Bret Harte. In both these cases the parodies are really no more than proofs of the universal popularity of the writers parodied. But when we read in Rejected Addresses the parodies on Wordsworth and Coleridge, we feel that the writers were intentionally casting ridicule on certain trivialities, certain commonplaces both of diction and thought, to which these great men did occasionally sink.
It seems to us, also, that Jeffrey has rated the virtue of sound in a parody too low—which is, perhaps, only to say that he rates the whole art of parody higher than we do. Surely it is an essential of this sort of imitation that the words should strike the ear with the very echo of the original. For this reason the specimens we have quoted seem to us so particularly good; and for the same reason, with the exception of the “Lay of the Lovelorn,” the clever ballads of Bon Gaultier do not seem to us to really come under the definition of parodies at all. And it is this quality which gives the point to Mr. Bromley Davenport’s “Lowesby Hall.”[20] In such lines as these—though, indeed, the whole parody is so good that selection is difficult—it is the sound which does everything, but how inimitably it does it!—
Here at least I’ll stay no longer, let me seek for some abode,
Deep in some provincial country far from rail or turnpike road;
There to break all links of habit, and to find a secret charm