SOURCE: Johnson, Samuel. “Parnell.” In Lives of the English Poets, Vol. 2, edited by George Birkbeck Hill, 49-56. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905.

In the following essay, originally published in 1781, Johnson provides a brief overview of Parnell's life and claims that his poems, while not works that stemmed from a great mind, have a pleasant sense about them which was enjoyable to the writer himself as well as the reader.

The Life of Dr. Parnell is a task which I should very willingly decline, since it has been lately written by Goldsmith¹, a man of such variety of powers and such felicity of performance that he always seemed to do best that which he was doing²; a man who had the art of being minute without tediousness, and general without confusion; whose language was copious without exuberance, exact without constraint, and easy without weakness.

What such an author has told, who...