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troversie Tassesche,' and raised up two poetical factions, which infected the Italians with a national fever. Tasso and Ariosto were perpetually weighed and outweighed against each other; Galileo wrote annotations on Tasso, stanza after stanza, and without reserve, treating the majestic bard with a severity which must have thrown the Tassoists into an agony. Our critic lent his manuscript to Jacopo Mazzoni, who, probably being a disguised Tassoist, by some unaccountable means contrived that the manuscript should be absolutely lost!-to the deep regret of the author and all the Ariostoists. The philosopher descended to his grave-not without occasional groans-nor without exulting reminiscences of the blows he had in his youth inflicted on the great rival of Ariosto-and the rumour of such a work long floated on tradition! Two centuries had nearly elapsed, when Serassi, employed on his elaborate life of Tasso, among his uninterrupted researches in the public libraries of Rome, discovered a miscellaneous volume, in which, on a cursory examination, he found deposited the lost manuscript of Galileo! It was a shock from which, perhaps, the zealous biographer of Tasso never fairly recovered; the awful name of Galileo sanc tioned the asperity of critical decision, and more particularly the severe remarks on the language; a subject on which the Italians are so morbidly delicate, and so trivially grave. Serassi's conduct on this occasion was at once political, umorous and cunning. Gladly would he have annihilated the original, but this was impossible! It was some consolation that the manuscript was totally unknown -for having got mixed with others, it had accidentally been passed over, and not entered into the catalogue; his own digent eye only had detected its existence. Nessuno fin ora sa, fuori di me, se vi sia, ne dove sia, e cosi non potra darsi alla luce,' &c. But in the true spirit of a collector, avaricious of all things connected with his pursuits, Serassi cautiously but completely, transcribed the precious manuscript, with an intention, according to his memorandum, to unravel all its sophistry. However, although the Abbate never wanted leisure, he persevered in his silence; yet he often trembled lest some future explorer of manuscripts might be found as sharpsighted as himself. He was so cautious as not even to venture to note down the library where the manuscript was to be found, and to this day no one appears to have fallen on the volume! On the death of Serassi, his papers came to the hands of the Duke of Ceri, a lover of literature; the transcript of the yet undiscovered original was then revealed! and this secret history of the manuscript was drawn from a note on the title-page written by Serassi himself. To satisfy the urgent curiosity of the literat, these annotations on Tasso by Galileo were published in 1793. Here is a work, which, from its earliest stage, much pains had been taken to suppress; but Serassi's collecting passion inducing him to preserve what he himself so much wished should never appear, finally occasioned its publication! It adds one evidence to the many, which prove that such sinister practices have been frequent ly used by the historians of a party, poetic or politic.

Unquestionably this entire suppression of manuscripts has been too frequently practised. It is suspected that our historical antiquary Speed owed many obligations to the learned Hugh Broughton, for he possessed a vast number of his MSS. which he burnt. Why did he burn? If persons place themselves in suspicious situations, they must not compiain if they be suspected. We have had historians who, whenever they met with information which has not suited their historical system, or their inveterate prejudices, have employed interpolations, castrations, and forgeries, and in some cases have annihilated the entire document. Leland's invaluable manuscripts were left at his death in the confused state in which the mind of the writer had sunk, overcome by his incessant labours, when this royal antiquary was employed by Henry VIII to write our national antiquities. His scattered manuscripts were long a common prey to many who never acknowledged their fountain head; among these suppressors and dilapidators pre-eminently stands the crafty Italian Polydore Vergil, who not only drew largely from this source, but, to cover the robbery, did not omit to depreciate the father of our antiquities—an act of a piece with the character of the man, who is said to have collected and burnt a greater number of historical MSS than would have loaded a wagon, to prevent the detection of the numerous fabrications in his history of England, which was composed to gratify Mary and the catholic cause.

The Harleian manuscript, 7379, is a collection of state

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'C. Morton.

Mem. Nov. 12, sent down to Mrs Macaulay.' As no memorandum of the name of any student to whom a manuscript is delivered for his researches was ever made before or since, or in the nature of things will ever be, this memorandum must involve our female historian in the obloquy of this dilapidation.* Such dishonest practices of party feeling, indeed are not peculiar to any party. In Mr Roscoe's interesting Illustrations' of his life of Lorenzo de'Medici, we discover that Fabroni, whose character scarcely admits of suspicion, appears to have known of the existence of an unpublished letter of Sixtus IV, which involves that pontiff deeply in the assassination pro jected by the Pazzi; but he carefully suppressed its notice: yet, in his conscience, he could not avoid alluding to such documents, which he concealed by his silence. Mr Roscoe has ably defended Fabroni, who may have overlooked this decisive evidence of the guilt of the hypocritical pontiff in the mass of manuscripts; a circumstance not likely to have occurred, however to this laborious historical inquirer. All party feeling is the same active spirit with an opposite direction. We have a remarkable case, where a most interesting historical production has been silently annihilated by the consent of both parties. There once existed an important diary of a very extraordinary character, Sir George Saville, afterwards Marquis of Halifax. This master-spirit, for such I am inclined to consider the author of the little book of Maxims and Reflections,' with a philosophical indifference, appears to have held in equal contempt all the factions of his times, and, consequently, has often incurred their severe censures. Among other things, the Marquis of Halifax had noted down the con versations he had had with Charles the Second, and the great and busy characters of the age. Of this curious secret history there existed two copies, and the noble writer imagined that by this means he had carefully secured their existence; yet both copies were destroyed from op posite motives; the one at the instigation of Pope, who was alarmed at finding some of the catholic intrigues of the court developed; and the other at the suggestion of a noble friend, who was equally shocked at discovering that his party, the Revolutionists, had sometimes practised mean and dishonourable deceptions. It is in these legacies of honourable men, of whatever party they may be, that we expect to find truth and sincerity; but thus it happens that the last hope of posterity is frustrated by the artifices, or the malignity, of these party-passions. Pulteney, afterwards the Earl of Bath, had also prepared memoirs of his times, which he proposed to confide to Dr Douglas, bishop of Salisbury, to be composed by the bishops; but his lordship's heir, the general, insisted on destroying these authentic documents, of the value of which we have a notion by one of those conversations which the earl was in the habit of indulging with Hooke, whom he at that time appears to have intended for his historian.

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The same hostility to manuscripts, as may be easily imagined, has occurred, perhaps more frequently, on the continent. I shall furnish one considerable fact. A French canon, Claude Joly, a bold and learned writer, had finished an ample life of Erasmus, which included a history of the restoration of literature, at the close of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century. Colomiés tells us, that the author had read over the works of Erasmus seven times; we have positive evidence that the

It is now about twenty-seven years ago since I first published this anecdote; at the same time I received information that our female historian and dilapidator had acted in this manner more than once. At that distance of time this rumour so notorious at the British Museum it was impossible to authenticate. The Rev. William Graham, the surviving husband of Mrs Macaulay, intemperately called on Dr Morton, in a very advanced period of life, to declare that it appeared to him that the note does not contain any evidence that the leaves were torn out by Mrs Macauley.' It was more apparent to the unprejudiced, that the doctor must have singularly lost the use of his memory, when he could not explain his own official note, which, perhaps, at the time he was compelled to insert. Dr Morton was not unfriendly to Mrs Macauley's political party; he was the Editor of Whitelocke's Diary of his Embassy to the Queen of Sweden, (and has, I believe, largely castrated the work. The original lies at the British Museum.

Ms. was finished for the press; the Cardinal De Noailles would examine the work itself; this important history was not only suppressed, but the hope entertained of finding it among the cardinal's papers was never realized.

These are instances of the annihilation of history; but there is a partial suppression, or castration of passages, equally fatal to the cause of truth; a practice too prevalent among the first editors of memoirs. By such deprivations of the text we have lost important truths, while in some cases, by interpolations, we have been loaded with the fictions of a party. Original memoirs, when published, should now be deposited at that great institution consecrated to our national history-the British Museum, to be verified at all times. In Lord Herbert's history of Henry the Eighth, I find, by a manuscript note, that several things were not permitted to be printed, and that the original Ms. was supposed to be in Mr Sheldon's custody, in 1687. Camden told Sir Robert Filmore that he was not suffered to print all his annals of Elizabeth; but he providently sent these expurgated passages to De Thou, who printed them faithfully; and it is remarkable that De Thou himself used the same precaution in the continuation of his own history. We like distant truths, but truths too near us never fail to alarm ourselves, our connexions, and our party. Milton, in composing his history of England, introduced, in the third book, a very remarkable digression, on the characters of the Long Parliament; a most animated description of a class of political adventurers, with whom modern history has presented many parallels. From tenderness to a party then imagined to be subdued, it was struck out by command, nor do I find it restituted in Kennett's Collection of English histories. This admirable and exquisite delineation has been preserved in a pamphlet printed in 1681, which has fortunately exhibited one of the warmest pictures in design and colouring by a master's hand. One of our most important volumes of secret history, 'Whitelocke's Memorials,' was published by Arthur, Earl of Anglesea, in 1682, who took considerable liberties with the manuscript; another edition appeared in 1732, which restored the many important passages through which the earl appears to have struck his castrating pen. The restitution of the castrated passages has not much increased the magnitude of this folio volume; for the omissions usually consisted of a characteristic stroke, or a short critical opinion, which did not harmonize with the private feelings of the Earl of Anglesea. In consequence of the volume not being much enlarged to the eye, and being unaccompanied by a single line of preface to inform us of the value of this more complete edition, the booksellers imagine that there can be no material difference between the two editions, and wonder at the bibliopolical mystery that they can afford to sell the edition of 1682 at ten shillings, and have five guineas for the edition of 1732! Hume, who, I have been told, wrote his history usually on a sofa, with the epicurean indolence of his fine genius, always refers to the old truncated and faithless edition of Whitelocke-so little in his day did the critical history of books enter into the studies of our authors, or such was the carelesness of our historian. There is more philosophy in editions, than some philosophers are aware of. Perhaps most Memoirs' have been unfaithfully published, Curtailed of their fair proportions; and not a few might be noticed which subsequent editors have restored to their original state, by uniting their dislocated limbs. Unquestionably, passion has sometimes annihilated manuscripts, and tamely revenged itself on the papers of hated writers! Louis XIV, with his own hands, after the death of Fenelon, burnt all the manuscripts which the Duke of Burgundy had preserved of his preceptor.

As an example of the suppressors and dilapidators of manuscripts, I shall give an extraordinary fact concerning Louis XIV more in his favour. His character appears, like some other historical personages, equally disguised by adulation and calumny. That monarch was not the Nero which his revocation of the edict of Nantes made him seem to the French protestants. He was far from approving of the violent measures of his catholic clergy. This opinion of that sovereign was, however, carefully suppressed when his Instructions to the Dauphin' were first published. It is now ascertained that Louis XIV was for many years equally zealous and industrious; and, among other useful attempts, composed an elaborate Discours' for the Dauphin for his future conduct. The king gave his manuscript to Pelisson to revise: but after the revision,

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our royal writer frequently inserted additional paragraphs. The work first appeared in an anonymous 'Recueil d'Opu scules Litteraries, Amsterdam, 1767,' which Barbier, in his 'Anonymes,' tells us, was rédigé par Pelisson; le tout publié par l'Abbé Olivet.' When at length the printed work was collated with the manuscript original, several suppressions of the royal sentiments appeared, and the editors, too catholic, had, with more particular caution, thrown aside what clearly showed Loins XIV was far from approving of the violences used against the protestThe following passage was entirely omitted. 'It seems to me, my son, that those who employ extreme and violent remedies do not know the nature of the evil, occa sioned in part, by heated minds, which, left to themselves, would insensibly be extinguished, rather than rekunde them afresh by the force of contradiction; above all, when the corruption is not confined to a small number, but dife fused through all parts of the state; besides, the Reformers said many true things! The best method to have reduced little by little the Huguenots of my kingdom, was not to have pursued them by any direct severity pointed at them.'

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu is a remarkable instance of an author nearly lost to the nation: she is only known to posterity by a chance publication, for such were her famous Turkish letters; the manuscript of which her family once purchased with an intention to suppress, but they were frustrated by a transcript. The more recent letters were reluctantly extracted out of the family trunks and surrendered in exchange for certain family documents which had fallen into the hands of a bookseller. Had it depended on her relatives, the name of Lady Mary had only reached us in the satires of Pope. The greater part of her epistolary correspondence was destroyed by her mother; and what that good and Gothic lady spared, was suppressed by the hereditary austerity of rank, of which her family was too susceptible. The entire correspondence of this admirable writer, and studious woman-for once, in perusing some unpublished letters of Lady Mary, I discovered that she had been in the habit of reading seven hours a day for many years'-would undoubtedly have exhibited a fine statue, instead of the torso we now possess; and we might have lived with her ladyship, as we do with Madame de Sevigné. This I have mentioned elsewhere; but I have since discovered that a considerable correspondence of Lady Mary's, for more than twenty years, with the widow of Col. Forrester, who had retired to Rome, has heen stifled in the birth. These letters, with other MSS of Lady Mary's, were given by Mrs Forres ter to Philip Thicknesse, with a discretionary power to publish. They were held as a great acquisition by Thicknesse and his bookseller; but when they had printed off the first thousand sheets, there were paris which they con sidered might give pain to some of the family. Thick nesse says, Lady Mary had in many places been uncommonly severe upon her husband, for all her letters were loaded with a scrap or two of poetry at hini * A nego tiation took place with an agent of Lord Bute's-alter some time Miss Forrester put in her claims for the MSS and the whole terminated, as Thicknesse tells us, in her obtaining a pension, and Lord Bute all the MSS.

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The late Duke of Bridgewater, I am informed, burnt many of the numerous family papers, and bricked up a quantity, which, when opened after his death, were found to have perished. It is said he declared that he did not choose that his ancestors should be traced back to a person of a mean trade, which it seems might possibly have been the case. The loss now cannot be appreciated; but unquestionably, stores of history, and, perhaps, of litera ture, were sacrificed. Milton's manuscript of Comms was published from the Bridgewater collection, for it had escaped the bricking up!

Manuscripts of great interest are frequently suppressed from the shameful indifference of the possessors.

Mr Mathas, in his Essay on Gray, tells us, that in addition to the valuable manuscripts of Mr Gray, there is reason to think that there were some other papers, folia Sibyllæ, in the possession of Mr Mason; but though a very diligent and anxious inquiry has been made after them, they cannot be discovered since his death.' There was, however, one fragment, by Mr Mason's own descrip tion of it, of very great value, namely, The plan of a bed

* There was one passage he recollected-Just left my 1 a lifeless trunk, and scarce a dreaming head!

intended speech in Latin on his appointment as professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge.' Mr Mason says, Immediately on his appointment Mr Gray sketched out an admirable plan for his inauguration speech; in which after enumerating the preparatory and auxiliary studies requisite, such as ancient history, geography, chronology, &c, he descended to the authentic sources of the science, such as public treaties, state-re. cords, private correspondence of ambassadors, &c. He also wrote the exordium of this thesis, not, indeed, so correct as to be given by way of fragment, but so spirited in point of sentiment, as leaves it much to be regretted that he did not proceed to its conclusion.' This fragment cannot now be found; and after so very interesting a description of its value, and of its importance, it is difficult to conceive how Mr Mason could prevail upon himself to withhold it. If there be a subject on which more, perhaps, than on any other, it would have been peculiarly desirable to know, and to follow the train of the ideas of Gray, it is that of modern history, in which no man was more intimately, more accurately, or more extensively conversant than our poet. A sketch or plan from his hand, on the subjects of history, and on those which belonged to it, might have taught succeeding ages how to conduct these important researches with national advantage, and, like some wand of divination, it might have

Pointed to beds where sovereign gold doth grow.'*

DRYDEN.

I suspect that I could point out the place in which these precious folia Sibylle' of Gray's lie interred; it would no doubt be found among other Sibylline leaves of Mason, of which there are two large boxes, which he left to the care of his executors. These gentlemen, as I am informed, are so extremely careful of them, as to have intrepidly resisted the importunity of some lovers of literature, whose curiosity has been aroused by the secreted treasures. It is a misfortune which has frequently attended this stort of bequests of literary men, that they have left their manuscripts, like their household furniture; and in several cases we find that many legatees conceive that all manuscripts are either to be burnt, like obsolete receipts, or to be nailed down in a box, that they may not stir a law-suit!

In a manuscript note of the times, I find that Sir Richard Baker, the author of a chronicle, formerly the most popular one, died in the Fleet; and that his son-in-law, who had all his papers, burnt them for waste paper; and he said, that he thought Sir Richard's life was among them! An auto-biography of those days which

we should now highly prize.

Among these mutilators of manuscripts we cannot too strongly remonstrate with those who have the care of the works of others, and convert them into a vehicle for their own particular purposes, even when they run directly counter to the knowledge and opinions of the original writer. Hard was the fate of honest Anthony Wood, when Dr Fell undertook to have his history of Oxford translated into Latin; the translator, a sullen dogged fellow, when he observed that Wood was enraged at seeing the perpetual alterations of his copy made to please Dr Fell, delighted to alter it the more; while the greater executioner supervising the printed sheets, by 'correcting, altering, or dashing out what he pleased,' compelled the writer publicly to disavow his own work! Such I have heard was the case of Bryan Edwards, who composed the first accounts of Mungo Park. Bryan Edwards, whose personal interests were opposed to the abol ishment of the slave trade, would not suffer any passage to stand in which the African traveller had expressed his Conviction of its inhumanity. Park, among confidential friends, trequently complained that his work did not only not contain his opinions, but was even interpolated with many which he utterly disclaimed!

Suppressed books become as rare as manuscripts. When I was employed in some researches respecting the history of the Mar-prelate faction, that ardent conspiracy against the established Hierarchy, and of which the very name is but imperfectly to be traced in our history, I discovered that the books and manuscripts of the Mar-pre* I have seen a transcript, by the favour of a gentleman who I sert it to me, of Gray's directions for reading History. It had Its merits at a time when our best histories had not been pub. lished, but it is entirely superseded by the admirable 'Methode' of Lenglet du Fresnoy.

lates have been too cautiously suppressed, or too completely destroyed; while those on the other side have been as carefully preserved. In our national collection, the British Museum, we find a great deal against Mar-prelate, but not Mar-prelate himself.

I have written the history of this conspiracy in the third volume of 'Quarrels of Authors.'

PARODIES.

A lady of bas bleu celebrity (the term is getting odious, particularly to our scavantes) had two friends, whom she equally admired-an elegant poet and his parodist. She had contrived to prevent their meeting as long as her stra tagems lasted, till at length she apologized to the serious bard for inviting him when his mock umbra was to be present, Astonished, she perceived that both men of genius felt a mutual esteem for each other's opposite talent; the ridiculed had perceived no malignity in the playfulness of the parody, and even seemed to consider it as a compliment, aware that parodists do not waste their talent on obscure productions; while the ridiculer himself was very sensible that he was the inferior poet. The lady-critic had imagined that a parody must necessarily be malicious; and in some cases it is said those on whom the parody has been performed, have been of the

same opinion.

Parody strongly resembles mimicry, a principle in human nature not so artificial as it appears: Man may be well defined a mimic animal. The African boy, who amused the whole kafle he journeyed with, by mimicing the gestures and the voice of the auctioneer who had sold him at the slave market a few days before, could have had no sense of scorn, of superiority, or of malignity; the boy experienced merely the pleasure of repeating attitudes and intonation which had so forcibly excited his interest. The numerous parodies of Hamlet's soliloquy were never made in derision of that solemn monologue, any more than the travesties of Virgil by Scarron and Cotton; their authors were never so gaily mad as that. We have parodies on the Psalms by Luther; Dodsley parodied the book of Chronicles, and the scripture style was parodied by Franklin in his beautiful story of Abraham; a story he found in Jeremy Taylor, and which Taylor borrowed from the East, for it is preserved in the Persian Sadi. Not one of these writers, however, proposed to ridicule their originals; some ingenuity in the application was all that they intended. The lady critic alluded to had suffered by a panic, in imagining that a parody was necessarily a corrosive satire. Had she indeed proceeded one step further, and asserted that parodies might be classed among the most malicious inventions of literature, when they are such as Colman and Lloyd made on Gray, in their odes to 'Oblivion and Obscurity, her reading possibly might have supplied the materials of the present research.

Parodies were frequently practised by the ancients, and with them, like ourselves, consisted of a work grafted on another work, but which turned on a different subject by a slight change of the expressions. It might be a sport of fancy, the innocent child of mirth; or a satirical arrow drawn from the quiver of caustic criticism; or it was that malignant art which only studies to make the original of the parody, however beautiful, contemptible and ridiculous. Human nature thus enters into the composition of parodies, and their variable character originates in the purpose of their application.

There is in the million' a natural taste for farce after tragedy, and they gladly relieve themselves by mitigating the solemn seriousness of the tragic drama; for they find, that it is but a step from the sublime to the ridiculous.' The taste for parody, will, I fear, always prevail; for whatever tends to ridicule a work of genius, is usually very agreeable to a great number of contemporaries. In the history of parodies, some of the learned have noticed a supposititious circumstance, which, however may have happened, for it is a very natural one. When the rhapsodists, who strolled from town to town to chant different fragments of the poems of Homer, had recited, they were immediately followed by another set of strollers-buffocus, who made the same audience merry by the burlesque turn which they gave to the solemn strains which had just so deeply engaged their attention. It is supposed that we have one of these travesties of the Iliad in one Sotades, who succeeded by only changing the measure of the verses without altering the words, which entirely disguised the Homeric character; fragments of which, scattered in

Dionysius Halicarnassensis, I leave to the curosity of the learned Grecian.* Homer's battle of the frogs and mice, a learned critic, the elder Heinsius, asserts, was not written by the poet, but is a parody on the poem. It is evidently as good humoured an one as any in the 'Rejected Addresses.' And it was because Homer was the most popular poet, that he was most susceptible of the playful honours of the parodist; unless the prototype is familiar to us, a parody is nothing! Of these parodists of Homer we may regret the loss of one, Timon of Philius, whose parodies were termed Silli, from Silenus being their chief personage; he levelled them at the sophistical philosophers of his age; his invocation is grafted on the opening of the Iliad, to recount the evil doings of those babblers, whom he compares to the bags in which Eolus deposited all his winds; balloons inflated with empty ideas! We should like to have appropriated some of these silli, or parodies of Timon the Sillograph, which, however, scem to have been at times calumnious. Shenstone's School Mistress,' and some few other ludicrous poems, derive much of their merit from parody.

This taste for parodies was very prevalent with the Grecians, and is a species of humour which perhaps has been too rarely practised by the moderns: Cervantes has some passages of this nature in his parodies of the old chivalric romances; Fielding in some parts of his Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews, in his burlesque poetical descriptions; and Swift in his Battle of Books,' and ' Tale of a Tub; but few writers have equalled the delicacy and felicity of Pope's parodies in the Rape of the Lock.' Such parodies give refinement to burlesque.

The ancients made a liberal use of it in their satirical comedy, and sometimes carried it on through an entire work, as in the Menippean satire, Seneca's mock Eloge of Claudius, and Lucian in his Dialogues. There are parodies even in Plato; and an anecdotical one recorded of this philosopher shows them in their most simple state. Dissatisfied with his own poetical essays, he threw them into the flames; that is, the sage resolved to sacrifice his verses to the god of fire; and in repeating that line in Homer where Thetis addresses Vulcan to implore his aid, the application became a parody, although it required no other change than the insertion of the philosopher's name instead of the goddess's:‡

'Vulcan, arise! 'tis Plato claims thy aid!'

Boileau affords a happy instance of this simple parody.Corneille, in his Cid, makes one of his personages remark,

Pour grands que soient les rois ils sont ce que nous sommes, is peuvent se tromper comme les autres hommes.'

A slight alteration became a fine parody in Boileau's 'Chapelain decoiffé,'

Pour grands que soient les rois ils sont ce que nous sommes, Ile se trompent en vers oomme les autres hommes,'

We find in the Athenæus the name of the inventor of a species of parody which more immeditately engages our notice DRAMATIC PARODIES. It appears this inventor was a satirist, so that the lady critic, whose opinion we had the honour of noticing, would be warranted by appealing to its origin to determine the nature of the thing. A dramatic parody, which produced the greatest effect, was the Gigantomachia,' as appears by the only circumstance known of it. Never laughed the Athenians so heartily as at its representation, for the fatal news of the deplorable state to which the affairs of the republic were reduced in Sicily arrived at its first representation-and the Athenians continued laughing to the end! as the modern Athenians, the volatile Parisians, might in their national concern of an opera comique. It was the business of the dramatic parody to turn the solemn tragedy,

Henry Stephens appears first to have started this subject of parody; his researches have been borrowed by the Abbé Sallier, to whom, in my turn, I am occasionally indebted. His little dissertation is in the French Academy's Memoires, Tome vii, 398.

See a specimen in Aulus Gellius, where this parodist reproaches Plato for having given a high price for a book, whence he drew his noble dialogue of the Timeus. Lib.

iii, c. 17.

See Spanheim Les Caesars de l'Empereur Julien in his 'Preuves, Remarque 8. Sallier judiciously observes 'Il peus nous donner une juste idée de cette sorte d'ouvrage, mais nout ne savons pas precisement en quel tems il a été cemposé; no more truly than the Iliad itself!

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which the audience had just seen exhibited, into a farcical comedy; the same actors who had appeared in magnificent dresses, now returned on the stage in grotesque habili ments, with odd postures and gestures, while the story, though the same, was incongruous and ludicrous. The Cyclops of Euripides is probably the only remaining specimen; for this may be considered as a parody of the ninth book of the Odyssey-the adventures of Ulysses in the cave of Polyphemus, where Silenus and a chorus of satyrs are farcically introduced, to contrast with the grave narrative of Homer, of the shifts and escape of the cunning man from the one eyed ogre.' The jokes are too coarse for the French taste of Brumoy, who, in his translation, goes on with a critical growl and foolish apology for Euripides having written a farce; Brumoy, like Pistol, is forced to eat his onion, but with a worse grace, swallowing and execrating to the end.

In dramatic composition, Aristophanes is perpetually hooking in parodies of Euripides, whom of all poets he hated, as well as of Eschylus, Sophocles, and other tragic bards, Since that Grecian wit, at length, has found a translator saturated with his genius, and an interpreter as philosophical, the subject of Grecian parody will probably be reflected in a clearer light from his researches.

Dramatic parodies in modern literature were introduced by our vivacious neighbours, and may be said to constitute a class of literary satires peculiar to the French nation. What had occurred in Greece a similar gaiety of national genius inconsciously reproduced. The dramatic parodies in our own literature, as in "The Rehearsal,' Tom Thumb,' and the Critic,' however exquisite, are confined to particular passages, and are not grafted on a whole original; we have neither naturalized the dramatic poetry into a species, nor dedicated it to the honours of a separate theatre,

This peculiar dramatic satire, a burlesque of an entire tragedy, the volatile genius of the Parisians accomplished. Whenever a new tragedy, which still continues the favourite species of drama with the French, attracted the notice of the town, shortly after uprose its parody at the Italian theatre, so that both pieces may have been performed in immediate succession in the same evening. A French tragedy is most susceptible of this sort of ridicule, by applying its declamatory style, its exaggerated sentiments, and its romantic out-of-the-way nature to the commonplace incidents and persons of domestic life; out of the stuff of which they made their emperors, their heroes, and their princesses, they cut out a pompous country justice, a hectoring tailor, or an impudent mantua-maker; but it was not merely this travesty of great personages, nor the lofty effusions of one in a lowly station, which terminated the object of parody; it was designed for a higher object, that of more obviously exposing the original for any absurdity in its scenes, or in its catastrophe, and dissecting its faulty characters; in a word, weighing in the critical scales, the nonsense of the poet. It sometimes became a refined instructor for the public, whose discernment is often hinded by party or prejudice. But it was, too, a severe touchstone for genius: Racine, some say, smiled, others say he did not, when he witnessed Harlequin, in the language of Titus to Berenice, declaiming on some ludicrous affair to Columbine; La Motte was very sore, and Voltaire, and others, shrunk away with a cry-from a parody! Voltaire was angry when he witnessed his Mariamne parodied by La mauvais Menage; or Bad Housekeeping,' the aged, jealous Herod was turned into an old cross country justice; Varus, bewitched by Mariamne, strutted a dragoon; and the whole establishment showed it was under very bad management. Fuzelier collected some of these parodies,* and not unskilfully defends their nature and their object against the protest of La Morte, whose tragedies had se verely suffered from these burlesques. His celebrated domestic tragedy of Inez de Castro, the fable of which turns on a concealed and clandestine marriage, produced one of the happiest parodies in Agnes de Chaillot. In the parody, the cause of the mysterious obstinacy of Pierrot the son, in persisting to refuse the hand of the daughter of his mother. in-law Madame la Baillive, is thus discovered by her to Monsieur le Baillif:

'Mon mari, pour le coup j'ai decouvert l'affaire, Ne vous étonnez plus qu'à nos desirs contraire. Les Parodies du Nouveau Theatre Italien 4 vol. 1738. Observations sur la Comedio et sur le Genic de Moliere, par Louis Riccoboni. Liv. iv.

Pour ma fille, Pierrot, ne montre que mepris: Violà l'unique objet dont son cœur est epris. [Pointing to Agnes de Chaillot.

The Bailiff exclaims,

'Ma servante?'

This single word was the most lively and fatal criticism of the tragic action of Inez de Castro, which, according to the conventional decorum and fastidious code of French

criticism, grossly violated the majesty of Melpomene, by giving a motive and an object so totally undignified to the tragic tale. In the parody there was something ludicrous when the secret came out which explained poor Pierrot's long-concealed perplexities, in the maid-servant bringing forwards a whole legitimate family of her own! La Motte was also galled by a projected parody of his Machabees' -where the hasty marriage of the young Machabeus, and the sudden conversion of the amorous Antigone, who, for her first penitential act, persuades a youth to marry her, without first deigning to consult her respectable mother, would have produced an excellent scene for the parody. But La Motte prefixed an angry preface to his Inez de Castro, he inveighs against all parodies, which he asserts to be merely a French fashion, (we have seen, however, that it was once Grecian) the offspring of a dangerous spirit of ridicule, and the malicious amusements of superficial minds. Were this true,' retorts Fuzelier, we ought to detest parodies; but we maintain, that far from converting virtue into a paradox, and degrading truth by ridicule, PARODY will only strike at what is chimerical and false; it is not a piece of. buffoonery so much as a critical exposition. What do we parody but the absurdities of dramatic writers, who frequently make their heroes act against nature, common sense and truth? After all,' he ingeniously adds, it is the public, not we, who are the authors of these PARODIES; for they are usually but the echoes of the pit, and we parodists, have only to give a dramatic form to the opinions and observations we hear. Many tragedies, Fuzelier, with admirable truth, observes, disguise vices into virtues, and PARODIES unmask them." We have had tragedies recently which very much required parodies to expose them, and to shame our inconsiderate audiences, who patronized these monsters of false passions. The rants and bombast of some of these might have produced, with little or no alteration of the inflated originals, A Modern Rehearsal,' or a new Tragedy for Warm Weather.'

Of parodies, we may safely approve of their legitimate use, and even indulge their agreeable maliciousness; while we must still dread that extraordinary facility to which the public, or rather human nature, are so prone, as sometimes to laugh at what at another time they would shed tears.

Tragedy is rendered comic or burlesque by altering the station and manners of the persons; and the reverse may occur, of raising what is comic and burlesque into tragedy. On so little depends the sublime or the ridiculous! Beattie says, In most human characters there are blemishes, moral, intellectual, or corporeal; by exaggerating which, to a certain degree, you may form a comic character; as by raising the virtues, abilities, or external advantages of indi viduals, you form epic or tragic characters;'* a subject

humorously touched on by Lloyd, in the prologue to the Jealous Wife.

'Quarrels, upbraidings, jealousies, and spleen,
Grow too familiar in the comic scene;
Tinge but the language with heroic chime,
'Tis passion, pathos, character sublime.

What big round words had swell'd the pompous scene,
A king the husband, and the wife a queen.'

ANECDOTES OF THE FAIRFAX FAMILY.

Will a mind of great capacity be reduced to mediocrity by the ill-choice of a profession?

Parents are interested in the metaphysical discussion, whether there really exists an inherent quality in the human intellect which imparts to the individual an aptitude for one pursuit more than for another. What Lord Shaftesbury calls not innate, but connatural qualities of the human character, were, during the latter part of the last century, entirely rejected; but of late there appears a tendency to return to the notion which is consecrated by antiquity. Experience will often correct modern hypothesists. The term 'pre-disposition may be objectionable, as are all terms

* Beanie on Poetry and Music, p. 1.

which pretend to describe the occult operations of Nature -and at present we have no other!

Our children pass through the same public education, while they are receiving little or none for their individual dispositions, should they have sufficient strength of character to indicate any. The great secret of education is to develop the faculties of the individual; for it may happen that his real talents may lie hidden and buried under his chance views, or by family arrangements. education. A profession is usually adventitious, made by Should a choice be submitted to the youth himself, he will often mistake slight and transient tastes for permanent dispositions. A decided character, however, we may often observe, is repugnant, to a particular pursuit, delighting in another; talents, languid and vacillating in one profession, we might find vigorous and settled in another; an indifferent lawyer might be an admirable architect! At present all sity, to come out, as if thrown into a burning mould, a our human bullion is sent to be melted down in an univerbright physician, a bright lawyer, a bright divine-in other words, to adapt themselves for a profession, preconcerted by their parents. By this means we may secure a titular profession for our son, but the true genius of the avocation in the bent of the mind, as a man of great original powers called it, is too often absent! Instead of finding fit offices for fit men, we are perpetually discovering, on the stage of society, actors out of character! Our most popular writer has happily described this error.

A laughing philosopher, the Democritus of our day, once compared human life to a table pierced with a numher of holes, each of which has a pin made exactly to fit it, but which pins being stuck in hastily, and without selection, chance leads inevitably to the most awkward mistakes. For how often do we see,' the orator pathetically concluded, how often, I say, do we see the round man stuck into the three-cornered hole!'

In looking over a manuscript life of Tobie Matthews, archbishop of York in James the First's reign, I found a curious anecdote of his grace's disappointment in the uncommon, as was confirmed by another great man, to dispositions of his sons. The cause, indeed, is not whom the archbishop confessed it. The old Lord Thomas Fairfax one day found the archbishop, very melancholy, and inquired the reason of his grace's pensiveness: My lord,' said the archbishop, I have great reason of sorrow with respect of my sons; one of whom has wit and no grace, another grace but no wit, and the third neither grace nor wit.' 'Your case,' replied Lord Fairfax, 'is not singular. I am also sadly disappointed in my sons: one I sent into the Netherlands to train him up a soldier, and he makes a tolerable country justice, but a mere coward at fighting; my next I sent to Cam bridge, and he proves a good lawyer, but a mere dunce at divinity; and my youngest I sent to the inns of court, and he is good at divinity, but nobody at the law.' The relat er of this anecdote adds, This I have often heard from the descendant of that honourable family, who yet seems to mince the matter because so immediately related.' The eldest son was the Lord Ferdinando Fairfax-and the gunsmith to Thomas Lord Fairfax the son of this Lord

Ferdinando, heard the old Lord Thomas call aloud to his grandson, Tom! Tom! mind thou the battle! Thy father's a good man, but mere coward! all the good I expect is from thee! It is evident that the old Lord Thomas Fairfax was a military character, and in his earnest desire of continuing a line of heroes, had preconcerted to make his eldest son a military man, who we discover turned out to be admirably fitted for a worshipful justice of the quorum. This is a lesson for the parent who consults his own inclinations and not those of natural disposition. In the present case the same lord, though disappointed, appears still to have persisted in the same wish of having a great military character in his family: having missed one in his elder son, and settled his other sons in different avocations, the grandfather persevered, and fixed his hopes, and be stowed his encouragements, on his grandson Sir Thomas Fairfax, who makes so distinguished a figure in the civil

wars.

The difficulty of discerning the aptitude of a youth for any particular destination in life will, perhaps, even for the most skilful parent, be always hazardous. Many will be inclined, in despair of any thing better, to throw dice with fortune; or adopt the determination of the father who settled his sons by a whimsical analogy which he appears to have formed of their dispositions or aptness for different

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