Parody, a burlesque and consciously exaggerated imitation of a serious poem, the words of which should strike the ear with the very echo of the original. So to parody a writer is obviously to pay a compliment to his popularity, and at the outset we may admit the truth of Shaftesbury's paradox that 'a subject which will not bear raillery is suspicious,' provided it be not taken to mean that ridicule is to be the test of truth. The making of parodies is a harmless amusement, and moreover they may be an effective means of exposing weakness and affectation; but it must never be forgotten that, as there are, says Bacon, certain things to be privileged from jest, so there is a region of poetry into which this form of imitation may not enter. And, apart altogether from their subject, there are some poems so unapproachably beautiful in mere form and melody that to attempt a parody is a sin. Yet there are fools of such obliquity of vision and darkened understanding that they will rush in to tread even upon holy ground and try to wring a jest out of anything. For example, Sir Charles Hanbury Williams' Old England's Te Deum is a form of merriment altogether to be disallowed, as are also the Mock Litany and Visitations of Sick Parliaments of Puritan times, and those three indifferent performances of Hone, magnified in 1817 by the foolishness of persecution into 'impions, profane, and scurrilous libels.'
To show any reason for its existence a parody must be very good, its subject legitimately within the range of the comic, itself skilful as an adaptation of a well-known original, and that original neither too good to be above, nor too bad to be beneath, ridicule. Its highest end is to emphasise by the exaggeration of caricature some mannerism or trick of metre; its surest success depends on a felicity in catching the flow of some familiar and favourite rhythm. It is true that thoroughly to enjoy a parody must detract a little from our pleasure in the original; yet no parody will please which is not genial and human, the child at once of appreciation and knowledge. At its highest, as in Calverley, it flows from a quite unusual combination of delicacy, creative imagination, and faculty for imitation, added to a dexterous mastery of rhythm.
Jeffrey, in his review of the famous Rejected Addresses, distinguishes between the mere imitation of externals and that higher and rarer art which brings before us the intellectual characteristics of the original. Of the latter order a diligent search has discovered but few English examples, amid the thousands of Mr Walter Hamilton's six bulky volumes.
The name parody is due to the Greeks, and the first parodist, according to Aristotle, was Hegemon of Thasos, whose parody of the Gigantomachia made the Athenians forget for a moment even their disasters in Sicily. Others ascribe its origin to Hipponax, a comic poet, who flourished about 540 B.C. The well-known Batrachomyomachia, or Battle of the Frogs and Mice, is an ancient mock-heroic epos; and there is extant, preserved in Athenæus, a fragment of several hundred lines by Matron, on an Attic banquet, in which each dish is introduced with epic solemnity after the manner of Homer. The comedies of Aristophanes contain many subtle touches of sarcastic banter belonging more or less definitely to this order, and we find a further development in the hexameter Silli of Timon of Phlius. Among the Romans we first meet this form of literature in the period of decline. The first satire of Persius is interspersed with numerous parodies on the most popular poems of the day, but there seems no adequate evidence for the assertion that the most severe of these were aimed at the verses of Nero. In France the burlesques of Scarron (Virgile travestié) and Dassoucy created a taste which Boileau and others strove to counteract, and were imitated in England by Charles Cotton and John Philips in his Splendid Shilling—a vastly overrated outrage on Paradise Lost. Of modern English parodies some of the most felicitous examples are to be found in the Rejected Addresses, full of clever and genial satire unblemished by vulgarity, of which its authors could say that of the twelve poets imitated 'not one ever betrayed the least soreness or refused to join in the laugh that we had occasioned.' The Bon Gaultier Ballads, by Aytton and Sir T. Martin, contain six admirable imitations professing to be by the unsuccessful candidates for the laureateship on the death of Southey. There are some exquisite examples in the two classical children's books of Lewis Carroll, but no parodies can be compared with those to be found in C. S. Calverley's Verses and Translations and Fly Leaves. Of these it is enough merely to name 'The Cock and the Bull,' and 'Lovers, and A Reflection' as masterpieces of the art. Seven clever imitations of as many leading poets of the day, including the reputed writer himself (A. C. Swinburne), were published anonymously as The Heptalogia, or the Seven against Sense (1880). Among elaborate prose parodies most famous are the Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum, but of these either the humour has long since evaporated, or modern men cannot now feel the merriment of what drew tears of laughter from the great Erasmuses. Of modern English examples may be mentioned Thackeray's 'Codlingsby' on Disraeli, and 'George de Barnwell' on Lytton; Bret Harte's Condensed Novels; and F. C. Bur-nand's 'New Sandford and Merton,' and 'Strap-more' on a too popular novel by Ouida.
See the article BURLESQUE; Delepiere, La Parodie chez les Grecs, les Romains, et les Modernes (Lond. 1871); and for a vast collection of English examples of all degrees of value, Walter Hamilton's too voluminous Parodies of the Works of English and American Authors (6 vols. 1884-89).