Next, after London, come the quiet little book stores of the old Cathedral cities, such as Exeter and Canterbury; here, if theology is a trifle too obtrusive, the dealer will soon gauge your appetite, and provide a fitting meal. Then, I would say Paris, but the Paris of to-day is, in this respect, vastly inferior to Paris under the Empire. Then, a stroll along the quays and boulevards led to good sport, for the game was plentiful, and ridiculously cheap. The element of cheapness remains, but the true literary flavour is wanting. Thousands of books, that are not books, school and prize books, old almanacs, dreary directories, medical reports, and soiled copies of trashy novels. These form the bulk.
“La Parodie, Monsieur? La Parodie n’existe plus. Il y a trente ans qu’elle est morte dans la France,” was the remark made to me lately by a bookseller in the Galérie D’Orléans. It is but too true, the literary sarcasm, and the pleasant malice of the good old fashioned parody seem indeed to be dead in France.
“Ils se moquent de tous, mais ils ne plaisantent pas,” said another dealer speaking of their authors, and so it happens that in my private collection, but a poor hundred or so of volumes are of French parentage, and the titles of some of these are all that is fit to be read, unless by an enthusiastic student of Rabelais.
No mention was made in the prospectus of “Parodies” that Foreign parodies would be included, but a few brief notes as to the principal continental examples may be given, followed by such English works on the subject as have not already been described.
French Parodies and Burlesques.
The very first book of reference to be mentioned under this head is La Parodie, chez les Grecs, chez les Romains, et chez les Modernes. Par Octave Delepierre. Londres: Trubner & Cie, 1870. This contains a great deal of information, but it is far from complete.
In Les Curiosités Littéraires par Ludovic Lalanne (Paris, 1857) is a chapter, entitled Du Genre Burlesque in which there is considerable information on Parody in general, and French parody in particular. The first piece mentioned is La Passion de Notre-Seigneur Jésus Christ, en vers burlesques, published in 1649; then come the works of Sarrasin, and of Assouci, the latter wrote Ovide en belle humeur and the Ravissement de Proserpine.
La Pharsale de Lucain, en vers enjoués, par Brébeuf, Paris 1655.
L’Eschole de Salerne, en vers burlesques, par Martin Leydon, 1656.
Peter Langendik, a Dutch poet, wrote a parody of the fourth book of the Æneid, which he called Enée endimanché; and the Danish poet, the Baron de Holberg, also wrote burlesque translations of parts of Virgil’s great poem.