Page:The Poetical Works of Thomas Parnell (1833).djvu/79

Rh 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."

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