It were a fruitless attempt to appease a power whom no prayers could entreat.

[S]end me that hag hither; she shall avouch what it was that she hath given to the wretch Dryfesdale, or the pilniewinks and thumbikins shall wrench it out of her finger-joints.

Logically speaking, a parodic reading is either intentionalist or voluntarist: either it presupposes a complicity between the reader and the author in their critical apprehension of the way the parodied discourse misfigures reality, or it is motivated by interests extrinsic to the text for which the reader is accountable.

Architecture, sculpture, painting are static arts. Even in literature our flying minds, as George Meredith says, cannot contain protracted description. It is so; for from sequences of words they must assemble all the details in one simultaneous impression. But moments of fleeting beauty too transient to be caught by any means less swift than light itself are registered on the screen.