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