to inform him that the small-pox was then making great ravages in the family, but that there was a summer-house with a field bed at his service at the end of the garden. There the disappointed Dean was obliged to retire, and take a cold supper that was sent out to him, while the rest was feasting within. However, at last they took compassion on him, and upon his promising never to choose the best bed again, they permitted him to make one of the company.
Goldsmith considers that the Scriblerus[1] Club began with Parnell, and that his death ended the connexion; if so, it was not of very long continuance, for Parnell's first excursion to England began about the year 1706, and he died in 1718.
From his long residence in Ireland, and from little of his correspondence having been preserved, Parnell has not been known as he deserves, nor is his name so familiar to us as that of many others of the friends of Pope, but he seems to have yielded to few of them in talent or acquirement; to none
- ↑ I suppose it to be generally known, that the name "Martinus Scriblerus" took its rise from a joke of Lord Oxford's, who used to call Swift, Dr. Martin. The poem of the Dunciad was suggested to Pope by Swift. See Swift's Letters, vol. xii. p. 440. "The taste of England is infamously corrupted by shoals of wretches who write for their bread, and therefore I had reason to put Mr. Pope on writing the poem called the Dunciad; and to hale those scoundrels out of their obscurity, by telling their names at length," &c.
