that honour, in conjunction with some others who better deserved it. I hope you will not wonder, I am still desirous to have you think me your grateful and faithful servant; but I own, I have an ambition still farther, to have others think me so, which is the occasion I give your lordship the trouble of this. Poor Parnelle, before he died, left me the charge of publishing the few remains of his. I have a strong desire to make them, their author and their publisher,1 more considerable, by addressing and dedicating them all to you. There is a pleasure in bearing testimony to truth, and a vanity perhaps, which is at least as excusable as any vanity can be. I beg you, my lord, to allow me to gratify it in prefixing this paper of honest verses to the book. I send the book itself, which I dare say you'll receive more satisfaction in perusing, than you can from any thing written upon the subject of yourself. Therefore I am a good deal in doubt whether you will care for any such addition to it. All I shall say for it is, that it is the only dedication I ever writ, and shall be the only one, whether you accept of it or not, for I will not bow the knee to a less man than my Lord Oxford, and I expect to see no greater in my time. After all, if your lordship will tell my Lord Harley that I must not do this, you may depend upon a suppres

1 Lintot paid to Pope the sum of fifteen pounds for Parnell's Poems, 13th of December, 1721. See Nicholl's Liter. Anec. vol. viii. p. 300.

sion of these verses, (the only copy whereof I send you) but you never shall suppress that great, sincere, and entire respect with which I am always, My Lord, your, &c.

THE EARL OF OXFORD TO MR. POPE.

Sir, Brampton Castle, Nov. 6, 1721. I RECEIVED your packet, which could not but give me great pleasure, to see you preserve an old friend in your memory, for it must needs be very agreeable to be remembered by those we highly value. But then, how much shame did it cause me when I read your very fine verses enclosed? My mind reproached me how far short I came of what your great friendship, and delicate pen would partially describe me; you ask my consent to publish it; to what straits doth this reduce me? I look back indeed to those evenings I have usefully and pleasantly spent with Mr. Pope, Dr. Parnell, Dean Swift, the Doctor,1 &c. I should be glad the world knew you admitted me to your friendship, and since your affection is too hard for your udgment, I am contented to let the world know how well Mr. Pope can write upon a barren subject. I return you an exact copy of the verses, that I may keep the original, as a testimony of the

1 Arbuthnot.

only error you have been guilty of. I hope very speedily to embrace you in London, and to assure you of the particular esteem and friendship wherewith I am your, &c.

From these letters, says Goldsmith, we may conclude, as far as their testimony can go, that Parnell was an agreeable, a generous, and sincere man, indeed, he took care that his friends should always see him to the best advantage, for when he found his fits of spleen and uneasiness, which sometimes lasted for weeks together, returning, he retreated with all expedition to the remote parts of Ireland, and there made out a gloomy kind of satisfaction in giving hideous descriptions of the solitude to which he retired,—from many of his unpublished pieces which I have seen, and from others which have appeared, it would seem that scarce a bog in his neighbourhood was left without reproach, and scarce a mountain round his head unsung. "I can easily, (says Pope, in one of his letters,1 in answer to a dreary description of Parnell's) I can easily image

1 This fragment of a letter is not to be found in Pope's correspondence as published in Dr. Warton's edition. I should therefore suppose that Goldsmith possessed the MS. which has not been preserved. I may here remark, that Pope's correspondence is not published in Warton's edition with the correctness or completeness that could be desired. How far the late editors may have supplied his deficiences,

to my thoughts the solitary hours of your eremetical life in the mountains, from something parellel to it in my own retirement at Binfield !" and in another place "We are both miserably enough situated, God knows, but of the two evils, I think the solitudes of the south are to be preferred to the desarts of the west." In this manner Pope answered him in the tone of his own complaints, and these descriptions of the imagined distresses of his situation, served to give him a temporary relief; they threw off the blame from himself, and laid upon fortune and accident, a wretchedness of his own creating."1

Parnell's situation was rendered more irksome by some mortifications which he might have avoided; he could not live without company when in Ireland ; and yet he despised or neglected a society so inferior in cultivation of mind and polish of manners to his English friends. Those whom he met at Lord Oxford's table, and Pope's library made him fastidious of humbler connexions; he did not exercise his arts of pleasing; the complaints he uttered against his situation were not relished by persons who lived contentedly around him; and who considered his reproaches as reminding them of an

I am not able to say, but a new and more perfect edition of Pope's works is much to be desired. Who so able to give one, as the Athenæus of the present age, the accomplished author of the Curiosities of literature, &c.

1 Goldsmith's Life, p. xv.

inferiority which they were not willing to confess, nor perhaps able to appreciate; in fact, as his biographer observes, "he sacrificed for a week or two in England a whole year's happiness, by his country fireside at home." Yet who ever exchanged the fascinations of a society in which the polished graces and gentle benevolence of manner were united with refined learning, and the various acquirements of a cultivated taste, for a lower grade of life, without feeling how much easier it would be to pass at once into perfect solitude; and how sensitive in that delightful and artificial atinosphere the mind becomes to the slightest shock, or ruder breath that it meets with in its altered intercourse with the world.

As his fortune was handsome, and his disposition liberal, his manner of life was elegant and even splendid. He had no great value for money, and indeed he so far exceeded his income, as to leave his estate somewhat impaired at his death. As soon as he collected his rents, he went over to England, where the friendship of Pope1 always received him with open arms; and where the wit and good humour of Gay and Arbuthnot, and the fascination of Bolingbroke's society, repaid him

1 In addition to Lord Oxford;-Pope, Swift, Arbuthnot, Gay, and Jervas, were the persons to whom Parnell was more particularly attached; his general society presume to have been much the same as Swift's, and what that was, may be seen in the Journal to Stella.