antithetical points, that the happy parody of him in the Rejected Addresses seems almost identical with what he himself would have written on the same theatrical subject, not intending to make so much game of it. The parody is like the echo of an eccentric laugh.

John Richard William Alexander Dwyer

Was footman to Justinian Stubbs, Esquire;
But when John Dwyer listed in the Blues,
Emmanuel Jennings polish'd Stubbs's shoes.
Emmanuel Jennings brought his younger boy
Up as a corn-cutter, a safe employ ;—
Pat was the urchin's name, a red-hair'd youth,
Fonder of purl and skittle grounds than truth,
Backs with pockets empty as their pate,

Lax in their gaiters, laxer in their gait.

The Splendid Shilling (see it in the present volume) is an excellent parody of the style of Milton. So is Isaac Hawkins Browne's Pipe of Tobacco, of the styles of Pope and Ambrose Philips.

Come let me taste thee, unexcis'd of kings

and (alluding to an anti-climax in Pope's praise of Murray)—

Persuasion tips his tongue whene'er he talks,

And he has lodgings in the King's Bench Walks.

But Parody, I think, sooner palls upon the reader than most kinds of Wit. In truth, it is very easy; and, in long instances, tiresome from its easiness, sometimes from its vulgarity. I remember in my youth trying in vain to read Cotton's Travestie of Virgil. It revolted me with its coarseness. I retained only the following four indifferent lines:

Thus spoke this Trojan heart of oak,

And thundered through the gate like smoke :
His brother Paris followed close,

Resolv'd to give the Greeks a dose.

There is some excellent parody, however, in Beaumont and Fletcher's Knight of the Burning Pestle, in the Duke of Buck

ingham's Rehearsal, Sheridan's Critic, and Fielding's Tom Thumb, particularly, I think, the last. It has more gaiety as well as good nature than the other satires.

The speech of Tom Thumb, when desired by the king to name his reward for the victories he has gained him, is a banter on the high flights in the plays of Dryden and others, some of which are literally given

King. Oh Thumb, what do we to thy valor owe?
Ask some reward, great as we can bestow.

Thumb. I ask not kingdoms;—I can conquer those ;

I ask not money;-money I've enough.
For what I've done, and what I mean to do,
For giants slain, and giants yet unborn,
Which I will slay,-if this be called a debt,
Take my receipt in full :-I ask but this,-
To sun myself in Huncamunca's eyes.

(Huncamunca is the princess royal.)

King. (aside) Prodigious bold request!

And the simile of the Dogs is too good to omit, for the solemnity of its triviality and the stately monosyllabic stamp of its music:

So when two dogs are fighting in the streets,
With a third dog one of the two dogs meets;

("Dogs meets" is an exquisite hiss, and punning intimation)—

With angry tooth he bites him to the bone;

And THIS dog smarts for what THAT dog had done.

This simile reminds me of a happy one of poor Kit Smart, in whom a good deal of real genius seems to have wasted itself away in complexional weakness. I quote it from memory :

Thus when a barber and a collier fight,

The barber beats the luckless collier white;
In comes the brick-dustman with rouge bespread,
And beats the barber and the collier red;
The rallying collier whirls his empty sack,
And beats the brick-dustman and barber black,
Black, white, and red in various clouds are toss'd,
And in the dust they raise the combatants are lost.

Dr. Johnson's mimicry of the simple style of the old ballads is good:

As with my hat upon my head

I walk'd along the Strand,
I there did meet another man
With his hat in his hand.

Nevertheless this jest is an edifying instance of a wit's not being always aware of the beauty contained in what he parodies. Johnson would have been fifty times the "poet" he was, had he been alive to the simplicity which he saw only in its abuse.

6th. Exaggeration, Ultra-Continuity, and Extravagance in General. These heads might be thought to belong to the preceding section; but there is generally satire in Burlesque, which is not perhaps the case with Exaggeration. You may exaggerate in order to eulogize, and sincerely too; the excess in that case being but the representation of the good spirits and gratitude with which you do it, and an intimation that justice is not to be done niggardly. Thus Falstaff, himself an exaggeration, overflows both in praise and blame. Love exaggerates as well as spleen. Everything exaggerates which has a natural tendency to make the best or the worst of what it feels. We "feed fat a grudge:" we pamper a predilection. The voluptuous is the expatiatory and the continuous. "Another bottle," makes its appearance, because the last was one too much, and it is three in the morning. But in regard to Wit and Humor, it must be confessed that Exaggeration is generally on the side of objection, though seldom illnaturedly. When otherwise, it becomes revolting, and defeats its purpose. Ben Jonson's attacks on Inigo Jones are not so good as his Epicure Mammon. The two best pieces of comic exaggeration I am acquainted with (next to whole poems like Hudibras) are the Descriptions of Holland by the author of that poem, and Andrew Marvel. The reader will find passages of them in the present volume. Holland and England happened to be great enemies in the time of Charles the Second, and the wits were always girding at the Dutchmen and their "ditch." Butler calls them a people

That feed, like cannibals, on other fishes,

And serve their cousins-german up in dishes ;

and Marvel, in the same strain, says,

The fish oft-times the burgher dispossess'd,
And sat, not as a meat, but as a guest.

Hazlitt, in his observations on Marvel (Lectures, ut sup. Tem-
pleman's edition, p. 105), cannot see the jest in this line. He
thinks it "forced" and "far-fetched." I remember he made
the same observation once to Charles Lamb and myself, and was
entering into a very acute discourse to prove that we ought not
to laugh at such exaggerations, when we were forced to inter-
rupt him by a fit of laughter uncontrollable. The exaggerations,
no doubt, are extremely far-fetched, but they are not forced;
Marvel could have talked such by the hundred, ad libitum; and
it is this easiness and flow of extravagance, as well as the rela-
tive truth lurking within it, that renders it delightful to those
who have animal spirits enough to join the merriment; which
Hazlitt had not. His sense of humor, strong as it was, did not
carry him so far as that. Had it done so, I doubt whether, on
the very principle of extremes meeting, he would have enumerat-
ed among his provocatives to laughter "a funeral," "a wedding,
or even "a damned author, though he may be our friend."
What he says about the difficulty of bearing demands on our
gravity is very true. I would not answer for my own upon oc-
casions of common formal solemnity, or even at
66 a sermon," if
the preacher was very bad. But the same liability to sympathy
with the extremest present emotion, which would have made him
laugh heartily with Marvel, would probably have absorbed him
in the troubles and griefs of the other occasions, and so pre-
vented his having a thought of laughter: for he was a very good-
natured man at heart. But the risibilities of the serious are not
always to be accounted for. Spinoza found something excess-
ively droll and diverting in the combats of spiders.*

* See, in Mr. Knight's "Weekly Volumes,” the Biographical History of Philosophy by my friend G. H. Lewes ;—the most lucid and complete summary of philosophical opinion, which the language possesses.

Falstaff exaggerates admirably on the subject of Bardolph's

nose:

If thou wert any way given to virtue, I would swear by thy face. My oath should be, "By this fire." But thou art altogether given over; and wert indeed, but for the light in thy face, the son of utter darkness. When thou ran'st up Gad's-hill in the night to catch my horse, if I did not think thou hadst been an ignis fatuus, or a ball of wildfire, there's no purchase in money. O, thou art a perpetual triumph, and everlasting bonfire-light! Thou hast saved me a thousand marks in links and torches, walking with thee in the night between tavern and tavern; but the sack that thou hast drank me would have bought me lights as good cheap, at the dearest chandler's in Europe. I have maintained that salamander of yours with fire, any time this two and thirty years. Heaven reward me for it!

King Henry IV., Part i., Act 3.

Of laudatory exaggeration there is a beautiful specimen put into the mouth of the Dauphin, in the play of King Henry the Fifth. Shakspeare probably intended it to be nationally as well as individually characteristic. It is spoken the night before the battle of Agincourt. But if it has all the confidence and animal spirits of our gallant neighbors, it is no less well intended towards their wit and eloquence.

Constable of France. Tut! I have the best armor of the world. Would it were day.

Duke of Orleans. You have an excellent armor; but let my horse have his due.

Constable. It is the best horse of Europe.

Orleans. Will it never be morning?

Dauphin. My Lord of Orleans, and my Lord High Constable, you talk of horse and armor.

Orleans, You are as well provided of both as any prince in the world. Dauphin. What a long night is this! I will not change my horse with any that treads but on four pasterns. Ha, ha! He bounds from the earth as if his entrails were hairs; le cheval volant, the Pegasus qui a les narines de feu! (He is the flying horse, that has nostrils of fire.) When I bestride him I soar, I am a hawk; he trots the air; the earth sings when he touches it; the basest horn of his hoof is more musical than the pipe of Hermes.

Orleans. He is of the color of the nutmeg.

Dauphin. And of the heat of the ginger. It is a beast for Perseus; he is pure air and fire; and the dull elements of earth and water never ap