and Celia will join in a grotesque ballet with shepherds and
shepherdesses; Ophelia in fleshings and a voluminous brevity of
grenadine will dance through the mad scene, finishing with the famous
"attitude of the scissors" in the arms of Laertes; and all the speeches
in "Hamlet" will be so ingeniously parodied that the originals will be
reduced to a mere _memoria technica_ of the improver's puns--premonitory
signs of a hideous millennium, in which the lion will have to lie down
with the lascivious monkeys whom (if we may trust Pliny) his soul
naturally abhors.

I have been amazed to find that some artists whose own works have the
ideal stamp, are quite insensible to the damaging tendency of the
burlesquing spirit which ranges to and fro and up and down on the earth,
seeing no reason (except a precarious censorship) why it should not
appropriate every sacred, heroic, and pathetic theme which serves to
make up the treasure of human admiration, hope, and love. One would have
thought that their own half-despairing efforts to invest in worthy
outward shape the vague inward impressions of sublimity, and the
consciousness of an implicit ideal in the commonest scenes, might have
made them susceptible of some disgust or alarm at a species of burlesque
which is likely to render their compositions no better than a dissolving
view, where every noble form is seen melting into its preposterous
caricature. It used to be imagined of the unhappy medieval Jews that
they parodied Calvary by crucifying dogs; if they had been guilty they
would at least have had the excuse of the hatred and rage begotten by
persecution. Are we on the way to a parody which shall have no other
excuse than the reckless search after fodder for degraded
appetites--after the pay to be earned by pasturing Circe's herd where
they may defile every monument of that growing life which should have
kept them human?