In the mysteries of manuring and the produce of a farm.
To deplore the fall of barley, to admire the rise of peas,
Over flagons of October, giant mounds of bread and cheese;
Never company to dinner, never visitors from town,
Just the Parson and the Doctor (Mr. Smith and Mr. Brown).
Droops the heavy conversation to an after-dinner snort,
And articulation dwindles with the second flask of port.
We are very far from saying that parody is a matter of sound only; to borrow a well-known line,
The sound must seem an echo to the sense.
But certainly it strikes us as being a very important point, and we doubt whether any really clever parody ever was written, or ever will be, in which it does not play a conspicuous part, if not the most conspicuous. And this, perhaps, is the reason why those greatest works of poetry, where the style strikes one as the natural and inevitable vehicle of the thought, are really above the reach of parody; why all attempts to parody them, however clever, lose their cleverness in the larger consciousness of bad taste. But to place all parodies under this ban is surely unreasonable. It is unreasonable, as depriving the world of a great deal of harmless amusement, and also, as we have said, of a method, often more truly efficacious than more serious castigation, of exposing incompetence and affectation.