ating to 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-prelates 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 stratagems lasted, till at length she apologised
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 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 mimetic animal. The
African boy, who amused the whole kafle he journeyed with, by mimicking
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 intonations 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 fr