PARODY (τrαpωδiα, literally a song sung beside, a comic parallel) may be defined as an imitation of the form or style of a serious writing in matter of a meaner kind so as to produce a ludicrous effect. The lowest savages show a turn for comic mimicry, and it is almost as old in European literature as serious writing. The Batrachomyomachia, or “Battle of the Frogs and Mice,” a travesty of the heroic epos, was ascribed at one time to Homer himself; and it is probably at least as old as the 5th century b.c. The great tragic poetry of Greece very soon provoked the parodist. Aristophanes parodied the style of Euripides in the Acharnians with a comic power that has never been surpassed. The debased grand style of mediaeval romance was parodied in Don Quixote. Shakespeare parodied the extravagant heroics of an earlier stage, and was himself parodied by Marston, incidentally in his plays and elaborately in a roughly humorous burlesque of Venus and Adonis. The wits of the Queen Anne age succeeded better in mock-heroics than in serious composition. A century later the most celebrated parodists were the brothers Smith, whose Rejected Addresses τaa,y be regarded as classic in this kind of artificial production. The Victorian age has produced a plentiful crop of parodists in prose and in verse, in dramatic poetry and in lyric poetry. By common consent, the most subtle and dexterous of metrical parodists is the late Mr C. S. Calverley, who succeeded in reproducing not merely tricks of phrase and metre, but even manner-istic turns of thought. Johnson’s dictum about pastoral poetry, that most of it is “easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting,” might be applied to parody; but Calverley would escape the censure.