Thomas Parnell, born in Dublin in 1679, and M.A. of Trinity College there, took deacon’s orders in 1700, and in 1705 was made Archdeacon of Clogher. He married, was intimate with the wits of Queen Anne’s time, and towards the end of her reign went over to the Tories. The queen’s death destroyed his hope of advancement by the change. Parnell obtained a prebend through the influence of Swift, and in 1716 was vicar of Finglass. He died in 1718, aged thirty-nine, and his friend Pope published, in 1722, a collected edition of his poems. The best of them was “The Hermit,” modernized from an old moral tale.

Personal

  Dr. Thomas Parnell was archdeacon of Clogher in Ireland. He was a very ingenious man. His poems were published by Mr. Pope. He took at last to immoderate drinking of mild ale, which kill’d him when he was hardly 40. ’Tis said he translated Homer’s Iliad into English in excellent prose, and that Mr. Pope afterwards put it into verse, and that this is what goes for Mr. Pope’s translation of the Iliad, that he (Mr. Pope) understands little or nothing of the original.

  Parnell, by what I have been able to collect from my father and uncle, who knew him, was the most capable man in the world to make the happiness of those he conversed with, and the least able to secure his own. He wanted that evenness of disposition which bears disappointment with phlegm, and joy with indifference. He was ever much elated or depressed; and his whole life spent in agony or rapture. But the turbulence of these passions only affected himself, and never those about him: he knew the ridicule of his own character, and very effectually raised the mirth of his companions, as well at his vexations as at his triumphs. How much his company was desired, appears from the extensiveness of his connections, and the number of his friends. Even before he made any figure in the literary world, his friendship was sought by persons of every rank and party.

  Parnell, who did not want ambition or vanity, was desirous to make himself conspicuous, and to shew how worthy he was of high preferment. As he thought himself qualified to become a popular preacher, he displayed his elocution with great success in the pulpits of London; but the queen’s death putting an end to his expectations, abated his diligence; and Pope represents him as falling from that time into intemperance of wine. That in his latter life he was too much a lover of the bottle, is not denied; but I have heard it imputed to a cause more likely to obtain forgiveness from mankind, the untimely death of a darling son; or, as others tell, the loss of his wife, who died (1712) in the midst of his expectations.

  The whole tenor of Parnell’s history convinces us that he was an easy-tempered, kind-hearted, yet querulous and self-indulgent man, who had no higher motive or object than to gratify himself. His very ambition aspired not to very lofty altitudes. His utmost wish was to attain a metropolitan pulpit, where he could have added the reputation of a popular preacher to that of being the protégé of Swift, and the pet of the Scriblerus Club.

  He was always in a state either of elation or depression. His company was much sought by men of both parties, for he was agreeable, generous, and sincere. When he had a fit of spleen he withdrew to a remote part of the country, that he might not annoy others. He shared Swift’s dislike of Ireland, and was consequently not popular with his neighbours. In spite of his considerable fortune, he seemed to have often exceeded his income; but his chief weakness, according to Pope, was his inability to resist the general habit of heavy drinking. Pope ascribes the intemperance to dejection occasioned by the death of Parnell’s wife. But the vice was apparently neither gross nor notorious. Parnell was fond of popular preaching, and was often heard in public places in Southwark and London in Queen Anne’s time.

General

  The agreeable Parnell.

  It is sufficient, to run over Cowley once: But Parnel, after the fiftieth reading, is as fresh as at the first.

  The universal esteem in which his poems are held, and the reiterated pleasure they give in the perusal, are a sufficient test of their merit. He appears to me to be the last of that great school that had modelled itself upon the ancients, and taught English poetry to resemble what the generality of mankind have allowed to excel…. Parnell is ever happy in the selection of his images, and scrupulously careful in the choice of his subjects. His productions bear no resemblance to those tawdry things, which it has for some time been the fashion to admire; in writing which the poet sits down without any plan, and heaps up splendid images without any selection; where the reader grows dizzy with praise and admiration, and yet soon grows weary, he can scarcely tell why. Our poet, on the contrary, gives out his beauties with a more sparing hand; he is still carrying his reader forward, and just gives him refreshment sufficient to support him to his journey’s end.

  The general character of Parnell is not great extent of comprehension, or fertility of mind. Of the little that appears still less is his own. His praise must be derived from the easy sweetness of his diction: in his verses there is more happiness than pains; he is sprightly without effort, and always delights, though he never ravishes; every thing is proper, yet every thing seems casual. If there is some appearance of elaboration in the “Hermit,” the narrative, as it is less airy, is less pleasing. Of his other compositions it is impossible to say whether they are the productions of Nature, so excellent as not to want the help of Art, or of Art so refined as to resemble Nature.

  Mr. Parnell’s tale of the “Hermit” is conspicuous throughout the whole of it, for beautiful descriptive narration. The manner of the Hermit’s setting forth to visit the world; his meeting with a companion, and the houses in which they are successively entertained, of the vain man, the covetous man, and the good man, are pieces of very fine painting, touched with a light and delicate pencil, overcharged with no superfluous colouring, and conveying to us a lively idea of the objects.

  The compass of Parnell’s poetry is not extensive, but its tone is peculiarly delightful: not from mere correctness of expression, to which some critics have stinted its praises, but from the graceful and reserved sensibility that accompanied his polished phraseology. The curiosa felicitas, the studied happiness of his diction, does not spoil its simplicity. His poetry is like a flower that has been trained and planted by the skill of the gardener, but which preserves, in its cultured state, the natural fragrance of its wilder air.

  We know not how it is with others, but we never think of Parnell’s “Hermit” without tranquilizing and grateful feelings. Parnell was a true poet of a minor order; he saw nature for himself, though he wrote a book style; and this, and one or two other poems of his, such as the eclogue on “Health,” and the “Fairy Tale,” have inclined us to believe that there is something in the very name of “Parnell” peculiarly gentle and agreeable.

  The character of his poetry is in keeping with the temperament of the man. It is slipshod, easy, and pleasing. If the distinguishing quality of poetry be to give pleasure, then Parnell is a poet. You never thrill under his power, but you read him with a quiet, constant, subdued gratification. If never eminently original, he has the art of enunciating commonplaces with felicity and grace. The stories he relates are almost all old, but his manner of telling them is new. His thoughts and images are mostly selected from his common-place book; but he utters them with such a natural ease of manner, that you are tempted to think them his own. He knows the compass of his poetical powers, and never attempts anything very lofty or arduous.

  Parnell is always an inoffensive and agreeable writer; and sometimes, as, for example, in his Nightpiece on Death, which probably suggested Gray’s more celebrated Elegy, he rises to considerable impressiveness and solemn pathos. But, although his poetry is uniformly fluent and transparent, and its general spirit refined and delicate, it has little warmth or richness, and can only be called a sort of water-color poetry.

  The great drawback to Parnell, notwithstanding the simplicity and charm of his style, is the want of the popular element in his subjects, and the absence of anything of passion or enthusiasm in his manner. The periodical contributions of Parnell were in the style of visions and allegories, which Addison so successfully employed, without the coldness and tediousness which usually characterised them in other hands. Those of Parnell possess considerable merit, but none of his prose was equal to his verse.

  In contemplating the Lampadephoria of poetical history we sometimes meet with a figure whose torch was well charged with the resin of genius and ready to be enflamed, but whom accidental circumstances removed from the line of light so long and so far that its destiny was never properly fulfilled. Such a figure is Parnell, who, having spent his youth as a thoroughly insignificant amateur in verse, was roused during the last five years of his life, under the influence of Pope, a much younger man than he, to strike a few magnificent chords on the lyre of a true poet…. This sententious and sonorous writer, whose verse in its deeper harmonies surpasses even Pope’s in melody, fancied himself a satirist, a society-singer, and emulated in his false ambition the successes of Oldham and Prior. But while he was vainly attempting to subdue for himself a province in Acrostic-land, there lay unvisited a romantic island of poesy, which was his by birthright, and it was Pope who opened his eyes to this fact…. “The Hermit” may be considered as forming the apex and chef d’œuvre of Augustan poetry in England. It is more exactly in the French taste than any work that preceded it, and after it English poetry swiftly passed into the degeneracy of classicism. Parnell’s poem is the model of a moral conte; the movement is dignified and rapid, the action and reflection are balanced with exquisite skill, the surprise is admirably prepared, and the treatment never flags from beginning to end.

  Besides Parnell’s significance as the first of the churchyard poets, there is in his poetry a genuine feeling for Nature, which is very unlike the Augustan spirit, and which even suggests Wordsworth. It seems as if the latter might have named Parnell along with Lady Winchelsea in his famous utterance in 1815.

  Who possessed the soul of a poet, but gave limited expression to it, for it was only during the later years of a short life that he discovered where his genius lay.

  We quite agree with Blair that Parnell would stand much higher in popular estimation had his merits not been so preposterously overrated by Hume.

  As a poet, Parnell’s work is marked with sweetness, refined sensibility, musical and fluent versification, and high moral tone. There are many faulty lines and awkward expressions, and there would have been more had not Pope revised the more important pieces. Pope, his junior by nine years, gave him much good advice, and the twenty poems which Pope published contain all by which his friend will be remembered. The best are “The Hermit,” “The Fairy Tale.” “The Night Piece on Death,” “The Hymn to Contentment,” and “Hesiod, or the Rise of Woman.” Parnell was a careful student of Milton, and his writings influenced Young and Blair in one direction and Goldsmith, Gay, and Collins in another.

  It is curious that, out of the small bulk of Parnell’s poetical work, poetical criticism of the most various times and tastes has been able to pick quite different things to sustain his reputation. The famous “Hermit” has kept its place in all anthologies; Goldsmith extolled the translations, and Johnson endorsed his views, though he himself liked the “Allegory on Man” best. And later censorship, which finds the “Hermit” not much more than a smooth and ingenious exercise in verse, and the translations and imitations unimportant, has lavished praise on two small pieces, “The Night-Piece on Death” and the “Hymn to Contentment,” the former of which certainly displays nature-painting of a kind unknown in the work of any but one contemporary, while the return of the second to the “Comus” alternation of trochaic and iambic cadence is an almost equally important, though doubtless unintended, protest against the ceaseless iambs of the couplet. It is not possible to call Parnell a great poet as he stands; but the quality and the variety of his accomplishment show that in slightly different circumstances and in other times he would probably have been one.