One may say that to laugh _Ivanhoe_ out of face, or to lessen the glory of that immortal story, would be beyond the power of any farcical effect.

Thackeray in his _Rowena and Rebecca_ certainly had no such purpose.

Nothing of _Ivanhoe_ is injured, nothing made less valuable than it was before, yet, of all prose parodies in the language, it is perhaps the most perfect.

Every character is maintained, every incident has a taste of Scott.

It has the twang of _Ivanhoe_ from beginning to end, and yet there is not a word in it by which the author of _Ivanhoe_ could have been offended.