om 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 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 farther, and asserted that parodies might be classed among the most
malicious inventions in 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--buffoons, 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 travestiers 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 curiosity
of the learned Grecian.[291] Homer's Battle of the Frogs and