Sometimes parodies of this kind had even a religious object, as when Dr. John Boys, Dean of Canterbury in the reign of James I., in his zeal, untempered with wisdom, attacked the Romanists by delivering a form of prayer from the pulpit commencing-- "Our Pope which art in Rome, cursed be thy name," and ending, "For thine is the infernal pitch and sulphur for ever and ever. Amen." "The Religious Recruiting Bill" was written with a pious intention, as was also the Catechism by Mr. Toplady, a clergyman, aimed at throwing contempt upon Lord Chesterfield's code of morality. It is almost impossible to draw a hard and fast line between travesty and harmless parody--the feelings of the public being the safest guide. But to associate Religion with anything low is offensive, even if the object in view be commendable. Some parodies of Scripture are evidently not intended to detract from its sanctity, as, for instance, the attack upon sceptical philosophy which lately appeared in an American paper, pretending to be the commencement of a new Bible "suited to the enlightenment of the age," and beginning-- "Primarily the unknowable moved upon kosmos and evolved protoplasm. "And protoplasm was inorganic and undifferentiated, containing all things in potential energy: and a spirit of evolution moved upon the fluid mass. "And atoms caused other atoms to attract: and their contact begat light, heat, and electricity. "And the unconditioned differentiated the atoms, each after its kind and their combination begat rocks, air, and water. "And there went out a spirit of evolution and working in protoplasm by accretion and absorption produced the organic cell. "And the cell by nutrition evolved primordial germ, and germ devolved protogene, and protogene begat eozoon and eozoon begat monad and monad begot animalcule ..." We are at first somewhat at a loss to understand what made the "Splendid Shilling" so celebrated: it is called by Steele the finest burlesque in the English language. Although far from being, as Dr. Johnson asserts, the first parody, it is undoubtedly a work of talent, and was more appreciated in 1703 than it can be now, being recognised as an imitation of Milton's poems which were then becoming celebrated.[3] Reading it at the present day, we should scarcely recognise any parody; but blank verse was at that time uncommon, although the Italians were beginning to protest against the gothic barbarity of rhyme, and Surrey had given in his translation of the first and fourth books of Virgil a specimen of the freer versification. Meres says that "Piers Plowman was the first that observed the true quality of our verse without the curiositie of rime" but he was not followed.