not for that should they abandon it; rather should they cry, with the author of _Obermann_, “Let us die resisting.” But whatever may be the moral virtue of a parody, there can be no question that to show any reason for its existence at all it must be very good. There is nothing in the world so pitiful as poor fun, and a bad parody is perhaps the poorest kind of fun. In his review of the famous _Addresses_, Jeffrey discussed the various sorts of parody at some length, and with a good deal of acuteness, distinguishing between the mere imitation of externals, mere personal imitation, so to speak――and that higher and rarer art which brings before us the intellectual characteristics of the original. “A vulgar mimic,” he says, “repeats a man’s cant phrases and known stories, with an exact imitation of his voice, look, and gestures; but he is an artist of a far higher description who can make stories or reasonings in his manner, and represents the features and movements of his mind as well as the accidents of his body. It is a rare feat to be able to borrow the diction and manner of a celebrated writer to express sentiments like his own――to write as he would have written on the subject proposed to his imitator――to think his thoughts, in short, as well as to use his words――and to make the revival of his style appear a natural consequence of the strong conception of his peculiar ideas.” And he goes on, “The exact imitation of a good thing, it must be admitted, promises fair to be a pretty good thing in itself; but if the resemblance be very striking, it commonly has the additional advantage of letting us more completely into the secret of the original author, and enabling us to understand far more clearly in what the peculiarity of his manner consists, than most of us would ever have done without this assistance.” Jeffrey here carries the parody into the regions of very high art indeed, if he does not, as we are rather inclined to think he does, lay more upon its shoulders than it can bear. In a note to the same review, when reprinted in the collected edition of his essays, he remarks of these _Addresses_ that “some few of them descend to the level of parodies, but by far the greater part are of a much higher description;” from which it would seem that he draws a distinction between a parody and something “of a much higher description,” which we must confess to being a little in the dark about, unless it be an imitation, and that we should be disposed to rank very much below a good parody. Many of our minor bards, for example, have produced extraordinarily close imitations of Mr. Swinburne’s style; but we should certainly rank these far below a clever parody, such a one, for instance, as that on _Locksley Hall_ in the “Bon Gaultier Ballads,”[18] or as Mr. Calverley’s inimitable “The Cock and the Bull,” or “Lovers,” and “A Reflection.” No better imitations, both of style and substance, have ever been written in