it were
possible." He laid his sword upon a stone at his side, "as gently," says
Hall, "as if its steel had been turned to glass, and almost immediately
sunk dead upon the turf."

From the "Leader."

BURLESQUES AND PARODIES.

Among the signs of intellectual barrenness and the vicious pandering to
lower appetites, consequent upon the _trading_ spirit of literature, we
note with regret the growing tendency to desecrate beautiful subjects by
using them as materials for burlesque. We have had a _Comic History of
England_--one of the dreariest and least excusable of jokes, and capable
of for ever vulgarizing in the young mind the great deeds and noble life
of our forefathers--and we have had burlesques in which the loved fairy
tales that have charmed the imaginations of thousands, or subjects of
mythology that belong to the religious history of the greatest people on
record, are turned into coarse pot-house jests, with slang for wit, but
_without_ the playful elegance by which Planche justifies his sport. It
is a sign of intellectual barrenness in the writers; for what is easier
than parody? what means of raising a laugh so certain and so cheap as to
roll a statue from its pedestal and stick some vulgar utensil in its
place? Laughter always follows the incongruous; and to make a Grecian
Deity call for a pot of half-and-half, or to ask a Fairy Princess if her
mother has parted with her mangle, is to secure the laugh, though
contempt may follow it. To our minds there is something melancholy in
such spectacles. Degrading lofty images by ignoble associations must
operate maleficiently on the spectator. And if it be absolutely
necessary to appeal to the coarse tastes and vulgar appetites of the
crowd, let it be done without at the same time dragging beautiful
objects through the mire.

We can understand the ribald buffoonery of LUCIAN, who first invented
this species of burlesque. His _object_ was to make the gods ridiculous.
Whether the spirit which moved him was a mocking, skeptical spirit, like
that of Voltaire, or whether, as we think more probable, he was a bitter
satirist made bitter by the earnestness of his conviction, and
ridiculing the gods only as a _reductio ad absurdum_ of their
pretensions, the fact is indubitable, that he ridiculed them in a
polemical spirit, and not to excite the vulgar laughter of the vulgar
crowd. But we, who do not believe in those gods, need no such warfare.
To us they are beauti