Among the poets patronised by Frederick, Prince of Wales, at the beginning of the eighteenth century was Henry Brooke, afterwards better known as a novelist by his _Fool of Quality_, published in the same year as the now famous _Vicar of Wakefield_. Brooke, in a remarkable poem entitled “Universal Beauty,” wherein every aspect of Nature is described with scientific exactness, anticipating the manner of Darwin in the “Loves of the Plants,” gave promise of a poetic future and fame to which he never attained. In early life a friend of Swift, Pope, and Chesterfield, as a man of letters he was widely known and respected for his public spirit and generous disposition, as well as for the high merit of his work. Ireland has never produced a more truly original poet than Thomas Parnell, the author of “The Hermit.” After he had acquired in Trinity College the classical training which, in the estimation of Goldsmith, placed him among the most elegant scholars of the day, a country parsonage received him into an oblivion which would have been final but for the kindly encouragement of Swift and Pope. So modest and diffident a man could never have emerged from the obscurity of his position in life unaided by some helping hand. As it was, his poems were not published, except in a posthumous edition by his great contemporary last mentioned. Although unable wholly to effect escape from the influences of the artificial school of the poetry of the so-called Augustan age, there is more real feeling naturally expressed, more genuine poetic sweetness, in Parnell’s “Hymn to Contentment,” or his “Night Piece on Death,” than in any other verse of his time. Without Pope’s incisive vigour or precision, he sounds a note more pure and exquisite, a note which appeals to the modern lover of poetry as Pope’s keen intelligence and perfection of phrase can never do. [Illustration: Berkeley.]