However that may be, parody and the parodists were themselves a cause of decay.

The public has long been agreed as to the merit of the most remarkable passages, the incomparable harmony of the numbers, and the excellence of that style which no rival has been able to equal and no parodist to degrade; which displays in their highest perfection the idiomatic powers of the English tongue, and to which every ancient and every modern language has contributed something of grace, of energy, or of music.

The description of the butterwomen's dress, to which Lamb refers, will illustrate the divergence between Elia and his parodist: Her attire is fashioned as follows: and it differs from all her tribe only in the relative arrangement of its colours.

We are sad parodists.

" Actors, like poets, have provincial parodists of their styles in even greater numbers, so adoringly imitative is humanity.

A parodist who published a list of alternate titles for the presentations at this event called this talk, "eBooks Suck Right Now," [eBooks suck right now] and as funny as that is, I don't think it's true.

It is marked here and there by his fondness for verbal antithesis, almost amounting to the pun, which his parodists have not overlooked.

Old Jacob married thrice; He dealt in coals, and avarice was his vice," or the lines which the parodists themselves quote in their justification, "Something had happened wrong about a Bill Which was not drawn with true mercantile skill, So to amend it I was told to go, And seek the firm of Clutterbuck and Co.

" After this, Crabbe himself might have admitted that the descent is not very far to the parodist's delightful apology for the change from "one hautboy" to "one fiddle" in the description of the band.

The style, moreover, has clarified and gained in dignity: there are few, if any, relapses into the homelier style on which the parodist could try his hand.

He was a butt of the parodists of the day.

Or even to adults, when they are spoken of without regard to a distinct personality or identity; as, "Which of you will go?""Crabb knoweth not which is which, himself or his parodist.

Modern parodists, of whom I will speak more particularly in a future chapter, have, I think, surpassed such poems as The Baby's Début and A Tale of Drury Lane, but in the far more difficult art of imitating a prose style none that I know of has even approached the author of the Hampshire Farmer's Address and Johnson's Ghost.

To his case the parodist of the period, in a moment of inspiration, adapted Burgon's beautiful couplet, saying or singing: "Match me such marvel, save in college port, That rose-red liquor, half as old as Short.

That is true, and indeed as a parodist Sir George Trevelyan belongs to the metrical miocene.

Charles Stuart Calverley is by common consent the king of metrical parodists.

Mr. Swinburne was in those days the favourite butt of young parodists, and the gem of the book is the dedication to "J.S." or "John Stiles," a mythical person, nearly related to John Doe and Richard Roe, with whom all budding jurists had in old days to make acquaintance.

Of the metrical parodists of the present hour two are extremely good.

A parodist writing in Truth applies the same "criticism of life" to commercial production: THE STORY OF BUNG.

Rochester himself provokes the parodist.

CALVERLEY, CHARLES STUART, a clever English parodist, Fellow of Christ's Church, Oxford; wrote "Fly-Leaves" and "Verses and Translations"; his parodies among the most amusing of the century, flavoured by the author's scholarship (1831-1884).

The Baron begs to return thanks for an odd volume, one of privately printed opuscula of "The Sette of Odd Volumes," which has been presented to him by the Author, Mr. WALTER HAMILTON, F.R.G.S., and F.R.H.S., who has the honour of filling the important post of "Parodist" in the above-mentioned society or "Sette."

Why it should have fallen to the lot of the "Parodist to the Sette" to do this, is only explained by the Sette being made up of Odd, very odd, Volumes.