PARNELL, Thomas (1679-1718), has a place in literature among the minor Queen Anne poets. He was a man of some private fortune, being the head of an English family settled in Ireland, and inheriting landed property both there and in Cheshire. Born in Dublin in 1679, and educated at Trinity College, he took orders and obtained various preferments in the Irish Church. But both as a landowner and a clergyman he was an absentee, and spent most of his time in London, where he was patronized by Harley, and received into the intimate friendship of Swift and Pope. He was a member of the Scriblerus Club, and co-operated in burlesquing the “Dunces” and defending the Tory ministry, at the same time attaining some repute in the London pulpits as a preacher. An easy-going wit, with interests mainly in literature and society, he made his peace with the Whigs on the accession of George, but still continued his alliance with Pope. When Pope published his Homer , Parnell produced a translation of the Battle of the Frogs and Mice (1717), and indirectly defended Pope against his critics in the accompanying “remarks of Zoilus” on the principles of translation. After his death in 1718— he died on his way to a living in Ireland—Pope published a collection of his poems. They are nearly all translations and adaptations. The best known of them, The Hermit, is sometimes overpraised on the supposition that it is original; all that Parnell did was to trick out a tale from the Gesta Romanorum with reflexions in the “elevated diction” of the period. “His praise,” Johnson says with justice, “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; ...