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Updated: July 22, 2025
The best plays no longer found decent representatives for any but one or two of their first parts; the pieces of more serious character and higher pretension as dramatic works were supplanted by burlesques and parodies of themselves; the school of acting of the Kembles, Young, the Keans, Macready, and their contemporaries, gave place to no school at all of very clever ladies and gentlemen, who certainly had no pretension to act tragedy or declaim blank verse, but who played low comedy better than high, and lowest farce best of all, and who for the most part wore the clothes of the sex to which they did not belong.
Our temporary state, whatever it is, is often mirrored in all that come near us, and our friends were fated to meet frequent parodies of their happiness from first to last on this journey.
Among these were brief narrative poems relating to the legendary or contemporary history of his country; editions of the religious romance of Euhemerus, of the poems dealing with natural philosophy circulating in the name of Epicharmus, and of the gastronomies of Archestratus of Gela, a poet who treated of the higher cookery; as also a dialogue between Life and Death, fables of Aesop, a collection of moral maxims, parodies and epigrammatic trifles small matters, but indicative of the versatile powers as well as the neological didactic tendencies of the poet, who evidently allowed himself the freest range in this field, which the censorship did not reach.
He knows what he is about when he bandages his head, and hires and drugs a babe, and poisons life with POOR MARY ANN or LONG, LONG AGO; he knows what he is about when he loads the critical ear and sickens the nice conscience with intolerable thanks; they know what they are about, he and his crew, when they pervade the slums of cities, ghastly parodies of suffering, hateful parodies of gratitude.
Of course there is room for much fancy here on the part of the spectator, but bears are in so many ways in their play, in their boxing, in their walking such grotesque parodies of man, that one is induced to accept the trainer's statements as containing a measure of truth.
The analogies and precedents that lead one to forecast the coming of military one-man-dominions, the coming of such other parodies of Cæsar's career as that misapplied, and speedily futile chess champion, Napoleon I. contrived, are false.
Byron mocked aloud, and, worse than all, the young men from whom so much had been expected, les jeunes feroces, leaped on the poor uncomplaining Ass like so many hunting-leopards. The air was darkened by hurtling parodies, the arrangement of which is still a standing crux to the bibliographers. It was Keats's friend, John Hamilton Reynolds, who opened the attack.
Then a deep whirr sounded overhead, and another, and another, and with a rush a dozen great toucans were all about me. Monstrous beaks, parodies in pastels of unheard-of blues and greens, breasts which glowed like mirrored suns, orange overlaid upon blinding yellow, and at every flick of the tail a trenchant flash of intense scarlet.
On the whole, the parodists were in a majority, and their parodies were just as blasphemous as one expects them to be in France. Through M. Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire, a typical French statesman of the philosophical cast, I secured an invitation to the solitary meeting which Gambetta, as candidate for Belleville, was permitted to hold prior to the actual election.
This curious passage is, therefore, to be regarded as Plato's satire on the tedious and hypercritical arts of interpretation which prevailed in his own day, and may be compared with his condemnation of the same arts when applied to mythology in the Phaedrus, and with his other parodies, e.g. with the two first speeches in the Phaedrus and with the Menexenus.
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