M.A. degree, being ordained deacon in the same year in spite of his youth. In 1704 he became minor canon of St Patrick's Cathedral and in 1706 archdeacon of Clogher. Shortly after receiving this preferment he married Anne Minchin, to whom he was sincerely attached. Swift says that nearly a year after her death (1711) he was still ill with grief. His visits to London are said to have begun as early as 1706. He was intimate with Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, and although in 17 11 he abandoned his Whig politics, there was no change in the friendship. Parnell was introduced to Lord Bolingbroke in 1712 by Swift, and subsequently to the earl of Oxford. In 1713 he contributed to the Poetical Miscellanies edited for Tonson by Steele, and published his Essay on the Different Styles of Poetry. He was a member of the Scriberlus Club, and Pope says that he had a hand in "An Essay of the learned Martinus Scriblerus concerning the Origin of Sciences." He wrote the "Essay on the Life and writings and learning of Homer"[1] prefixed to Pope's translations, and in the autumn of 1714 both were at Bath together. In 1716 Parnell was presented to the vicarage of Finglass, when he resigned his archdeaconry. In the same year he published Homer's Battle of the Frogs and Mice. With the remarks of Zoilus. To which is prefixed, the Life of the said Zoilus. Parnell was in London again in 1718, and, on the way back to Ireland, was taken ill and died at Chester, where he was buried on the 24th of October.
Parnell's best known poem is "The Hermit," an admirably executed moral conte written in the heroic couplet. It is based on an old story to be found in the Gesta Romanorum and other sources. He cannot in any sense be said to have been a disciple of Pope, though his verse may owe something to his friend's revision. But this and other of his pieces, "The Hymn to Contentment," "The Night Piece on Death," "The Fairy Tale," were original in treatment, and exercised some influence on the work of Goldsmith, Gray and Collins. Pope's selection of his poems was justified by the publication in 1758 of Posthumous Works of Dr Thomas Parnell, containing Poems Moral and Divine, and on various other subjects, which in no way added to his fame. They were contemptuously dismissed as unauthentic by Thomas Gray and Samuel Johnson, but there seems no reason to doubt the authorship.
In 1770 Poems on Several Occasions was printed with a life of the author by Oliver Goldsmith. His Poetical Works were printed in Anderson's and other collections of the British Poets. See The Poetical Works (1894) edited by George A. Aitken for the Aldine Edition of the British Poets. An edition by the Rev. John Mitford for the same series (1833) was reprinted in 1866. His correspondence with Pope is published in Pope's Works (ed. Elwin and Courthorpe, vii. 451-467).
PARNON (mod. Malevo), the mountain ridge on the east of the Laconian plain. Height 6365 ft. It is visible from Athens above the top of the Argive mountains.
PARNY, ÉVARISTE DÉSIRÉ DE FORGES, Vicomte de (1753–1814), was born in the Isle of Bourbon on the 6th of February 1753. He was sent to France at nine years old, was educated at Rennes, and in 1771 entered the army. He was, however, shortly recalled to the Isle of Bourbon, where he fell in love with a young lady whom he addresses as Eleonore. Her father refused to consent to her marriage with Parny, and she married some one else. Parny returned to France, and published his Poesies erotiques in 1778. He also published about the same time his Voyage de Bourgogne (1777), written in collaboration with his friend Antoine de Bertin (1752–1790); Epitre aux insurgents de Boston (1777), and Opuscules poetiques (1779). In 1796 appeared the Guerre des dieux, a poem in the style of Voltaire's Pucelle, directed against Christianity. Parny devoted himself in his later years almost entirely to the religious and political burlesque. He was elected to the Academy in 1803, and in 1813 received a pension from Napoleon. In 1S05 he produced an extraordinary allegoric poem attacking George III., his family and his subjects, under the eccentric title of "Goddam! Goddam! par un French-dog." Parny's early love poems and elegies, however, show a remarkable grace and ease, a good deal of tenderness, and considerable fancy and wit. One famous piece, the Elegy on a Young Girl, is scarcely to be excelled in its kind. Parny died in 1814.
His Œuvres choisies were published in 1827. There is a sketch of Parny in Sainte-Beuve's Portraits contemporains.
PARODY (Gr. Trapwdla, literally a song sung beside, a comic
parallel), an imitation of the form or style of a serious writing
in matter of a meaner kind so as to produce a ludicrous effect.
Parody is almost as old in European literature as serious writing.
The Balrachomyomachia, or " Battle of the Frogs and Mice, " a
travesty of the heroic epos, was ascribed at one time to Homer
himself; and it is probably at least as old as the 5th century B.C.
The great tragic poetry of Greece very soon provoked the parodist.
Aristophanes parodied the style of Euripides in the Acharnians
with a comic power that has never been surpassed. The debased
grand style of medieval romance was parodied in Don Quixote.
Shakespeare parodied the extravagant heroics of an earlier
stage, and was himself parodied by Marston, incidentally in his
plays and elaborately in a roughly humorous burlesque of Venus
and Adonis. The most celebrated parody of the Restoration
was Buckingham's Rehearsal (1672), in which the tragedies of
Dryden were inimitably ridiculed. At the beginning of the i8th
century The Splendid Shilling of John Philips (1676–1700),
which Addison said was " the finest burlesque poem in the
English language, " brilliantly introduced a fashion for using
the solemn movement of Milton's blank verse to celebrate
ridiculous incidents. In 1736, Isaac Hawkins Browne (1705–1760)
published a volume, A Pipe of Tobacco, in which the
poetical styles of Colley Cibber, Ambrose Philips, James Thomson,
Edward Young and Jonathan Swift were delightfully
reproduced. In the following century, Shelley and John
Hamilton Reynolds almost simultaneously produced cruel
imitations of the naivete and baldness of Wordsworth's Peter Bell (1819). But in that generation the most celebrated parodists were the brothers Smith, whose Rejected Addresses may be regarded as classic in this kind of artificial production. The Victorian age has produced a plentiful crop of parodists in prose and in verse, in dramatic poetry and in lyric poetry. By common consent, the most subtle and dexterous of these was C. S. Calverley, who succeeded in reproducing not merely tricks of phrase and metre, but even manneristic turns of thought. In a later day, Mr Owen Seaman has repeated, and sometimes surpassed, the agile feats of Calverley.
PAROLE (shortened from the Fr. parole d’honneur, word of
honour), a mihtary term signifying the engagement given by a
prisoner of war that if released he will not again take up arms
against his captors during the term of the engagement or the
war, unless previously reheved of the obligation by exchange.
" Parole " is also used in the same sense as " word " to imply a
watchword or password. The French word, formed from the
Late Lat. paraula, parabola, Gr. irapaPoKr], story, parable, was
also adopted into English as " parol, " i.e. verbal, oral, by word
of mouth, now only used in the legal term " parol evidence, "
i.e. oral as opposed to documentary evidence.
PAROPAMISUS, the name given by the Greeks to the parts of the Hindu Kush bordering Kohistan to the north-west of Kabul. It is now apphed in a restricted sense to the water parting
between Herat and the Russian frontier on the Kushk
river, which possesses no local name of its own. From Herat
city to the crest of the Paropamisus, which is crossed by several
easy passes, is a distance of about 36 m., involving a rise of
1000 ft.
PAROS, or Paro, an island in the Aegean Sea, one of the
largest of the group of the Cyclades, with a population of 8000.
It lies to the west of Naxos, from which it is separated by a
channel about 6 m. broad, and with which it is now grouped
together, in popular language, under the common name of
Paronaxia. It is in 37° N. lat. and 25° 10′ E. long. Its greatest
length from N.E. to S.W. is 13 m., and its greatest breadth
- ↑ Pope acknowledged the essay with affectionate praise, but in 1720 he said it was written "upon such memoirs as I had collected," and later he complained of its defects, saying it had cost him more pains to revise than it would have done to write it.
