is personages remark,

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

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

Pour grands que soient les rois ils sont ce que nous sommes,
Us fee trompent _en vers_ comme les autres hommes.

We find in Athenaeus the name of the inventor of a species of parody
which more immediately 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, 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 habiliments, 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 on 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 AEschylus,
Sophocles, and other tragic bards. Since, at length, that Grecian wit
has found a translator saturated with his genius, and an interpreter as
philosophical, the subject