erceived. The
modesty of praise wears gradually away; and perhaps the pride of
patronage may be in time so increased that modest praise will no longer
please.

Many a blandishment was practised upon Halifax which he would never have
known had he no other attractions than those of his poetry, of which
a short time has withered the beauties. It would now be esteemed no
honour, by a contributor to the monthly bundles of verses, to be told
that, in strains either familiar or solemn, he sings like Montague.

PARNELL.

The life of Dr. Parnell is a task which I should very willingly decline,
since it has been lately written by Goldsmith, a man of such variety of
powers, and such felicity of performance, that he always seemed to do
best that which he was doing; a man who had the art of being minute
without tediousness, and general without confusion; whose language was
copious without exuberance, exact without constraint, and easy without
weakness.

What such an author has told, who would tell again? I have made an
abstract from his larger narrative; and have this gratification from my
attempt, that it gives me an opportunity of paying due tribute to the
memory of Goldsmith.

Thomas Parnell was the son of a Commonwealthsman of the same name, who,
at the Restoration, left Congleton, in Cheshire, where the family
had been established for several centuries, and, settling in Ireland,
purchased an estate, which, with his lands in Cheshire, descended to the
poet, who was born at Dublin in 1679; and, after the usual education at
a grammar school, was, at the age of thirteen, admitted into the College
where, in 1700, he became Master of Arts; and was the same year ordained
a deacon, though under the canonical age, by a dispensation from the
Bishop of Derry.

About three years afterwards he was made a priest and in 1705 Dr. Ashe,
the Bishop of Clogher, conferred upon him the archdeaconry of Clogher.
About the same time he married Mrs. Anne Minchin, an amiable lady, by
whom he had two sons, who died young, and a daughter, who long survived
him.

At the ejection of the Whigs, in the end of Queen Anne's reign, Parnell
was persuaded to change his party, not without much censure from those
whom he forsook, and was received by the new Ministry as a valuable
reinforcement. When the Earl of Oxford was told that Dr. Parnell waited
among the crowd in the outer room, he went, by the persuasion of Swift,
with his Treasurer's staff