Member of a family and bearer of a name destined to secure immense fame in later Irish history, Thomas Parnell (1679-1718) was born in Dublin and educated at Trinity College. Entering the ministry in 1700, he was rapidly promoted to be archdeacon of Clogher and some years later was made rector of Finglas. An accomplished scholar and a delightful companion, he was one of the original members of the famous Scriblerus Club and wrote or helped to write several of its papers, he contributed to the Spectator and the Guardian, and he rendered sterling assistance to Pope in the translation of Homer. As will be inferred, he spent much of his time in England, and on one of his journeys to Ireland he died in his thirty-ninth year at Chester, where he was buried. He wrote a great deal of verse—songs, hymns, epistles, eclogues, translations, tales, and occasional trifles; but three poems, A Hymn to Contentment, which is fanciful and melodious, A Night-piece on Death, in which inquisitorial research seems to have found the first faint dawn of Romanticism, and The Hermit, which has been not inaptly styled "the apex and chef d'oeuvre of Augustan poetry in England", constitute his chief claim to present remembrance.
Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746), the son of a Presbyterian minister, was born at Armagh, and studied at Glasgow University. He opened in Dublin a private academy, which succeeded beyond expectation. The publication of his Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1720) and his Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions (1728) brought him great fame, and in 1729 he was elected to the professorship of moral philosophy in the University of Glasgow. Others of his works are a treatise on Logic and A System of Moral Philosophy, the latter not published till 1755, nine years after his death. Hutcheson fills a large space in the history of philosophy, both as a metaphysician and as a moralist. He is in some respects a pioneer of the "Scotch school" and of "common sense" philosophy. He greatly developed the doctrine of "moral sense", a term first used by the third Earl of Shaftesbury; indeed, much of his whole moral system may be traced to Shaftesbury. Hutcheson's influence was widely felt: it is plainly perceptible in Hume, Adam Smith, and Reid. He was greater as a speaker even than as a writer, and his lectures evoked much enthusiasm.
George Berkeley (1685-1753), bishop of Cloyne, was born at Dysert Castle, near Thomastown, Co. Kilkenny, and was educated first at Kilkenny school and afterwards at Trinity College, Dublin. Having taken Anglican orders, he visited London, where he wrote nine papers for the Guardian and was admitted to the companionship and friendship of the leading literary men of the age—Swift, Pope, Addison, Steele, and Arbuthnot. This connection proved of great assistance to him, for Pope not only celebrated him as possessing "every virtue under heaven", but also recommended him to the Duke of Grafton, Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, who appointed him his chaplain and subsequently obtained for him the deanery of Derry. In furtherance of a great scheme for "converting the savage Americans to Christianity", Berkeley and some friends, armed with a royal charter, came to this country, landing at Newport in Rhode Island in January, 1729. All went well for a while: Berkeley bought a farm and built a house; but when the hard-hearted prime minister refused to forward the £20,000 which had been promised, the project came to an end, and Berkeley returned to London in February, 1732. In 1734 he was appointed bishop of Cloyne, and later refused the see of Clogher, though its income was fully double that of his own diocese. In 1752 he resigned his bishopric and settled at Oxford, where he died in 1753.
Berkeley's works are very numerous. His Essay towards a New Theory of Vision (1709), which was long regarded in the light of a philosophical romance, in reality contains speculations which have been incorporated in modern scientific optics. In his Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713) he sets forth his famous demonstration of the immateriality of the external world, of the spiritual nature of the soul, and of the all-ruling and direct providence of God. His tenets on immateriality have always been rejected by "common-sense" philosophers; but it should be remembered that the whole work was written at a time when the English-speaking world was disturbed by the theories of sceptics and deists, whose doctrines the pious divine sought as best he could to confute. In 1732 appeared his Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher, in which, dialogue-wise, he presents nature from a religious point of view and in particular gives many pleasing pictures of American scenery and life. These dialogues have frequently been compared to the dialogues of Plato. To Berkeley's credit be it said that while he ruled in Cloyne he devoted much thought to the amelioration of conditions in his native land. Many acute suggestions in that direction are found in the Querist (1735-1737). By some extraordinary ratiocinative process he convinced himself that tar-water was a panacea for human ills, and in 1744 he set forth his views on that subject in the tract called Siris, and returned to the charge in 1752 in his Further Thoughts on Tar-Water. Whatever may be thought of the value of Berkeley's philosophical or practical speculations, there is only one opinion of his style. It is distinguished by lucidity, ease, and charm; it has the saving grace of humor; and it is shot through with imagination. Taken all in all, this eighteenth century bishop is a notable figure in literary annals.
Charles Macklin (c. 1697-1797), whose real name was MacLaughlin, was a Westmeath man, who took to the stage in early life and remained on the boards with considerable and undiminished reputation for some seventy years, not retiring until 1789 when he was at least 92 years old. To him we are indebted for what is now the accepted presentation of the character of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. He wrote a tragedy and many comedies and farces: those by which he is now best remembered are the farce, Love-à-la-Mode (1760), and his masterpiece, the farcical comedy, The Man of the World (1764). In Sir Pertinax MacSycophant, Macklin has given us one of the traditional burlesque characters of the English stage.
Thomas Amory (1691?-1788), if not born in Ireland, was at least of Irish descent and was educated in Dublin. He is known in literature for two books. The first, with the very mixed title of Memoirs containing the Lives of several Ladies of Great Britain; A History of Antiquities; Observations on the Christian Religion, was published in 1755, and the second, The Life of John Buncle, Esq., came out in two volumes in 1756-1766. It appears to have been the author's aim in both works to give us a hotch-potch in which he discourses de omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis. We have dissertations on the cause of earthquakes and of muscular motion, on the Athanasian Creed, on fluxions, on phlogiston, on the physical cause of the Deluge, on Irish literature, on the origin of language, on the evidences for Christianity, and on all other sorts of unrelated topics. Hazlitt thought that the soul of Rabelais had passed into Amory, while a more recent critic can see in his long-winded discussions naught but the "light-headed ramblings of delirium." If we try to read John Buncle consecutively, the result is boredom; but if we open the book at random, we are pretty sure to be interested and even sometimes agreeably entertained.
The bizarre figure of Laurence Sterne (1713-1768) next claims our attention. The son of a captain in the British army, he was born at Clonmel, Co. Tipperary. Of him almost more than of any of the writers so far dealt with, it may be said that he was Irish only by the accident of birth. His parents were English on both sides, and practically the whole life of their son was spent out of Ireland. He was sent to school at Halifax, in Yorkshire, and thence went to Cambridge University, where he graduated in due season. Taking Anglican orders in 1738, he was immediately appointed to the benefice of Sutton-in-the-Forest, near York, and on his marriage in 1741 with Elizabeth Lumley he received the additional living of Stillington. He was also given sundry prebendal and other appointments in connection with the chapter of the archdiocese of York. He spent nearly twenty years in the discharge of his not very onerous duties and in reading, painting, shooting, and fiddling, without showing the least sign of any literary leanings. Then suddenly, in 1760, he took the world by storm with the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy. He at once became the lion of the hour, was fêted and dined to his heart's content, and had his nostrils tickled with the daily incense of praise from his numerous worshippers. He repeated the experiment with equal success the following year with two more volumes of Tristram, and so at intervals until 1767, when he published the ninth and last volume of this most peculiar story. In 1768 he brought out A Sentimental Journey, and within three weeks he died in his lodgings in London. His other publications include Sermons and Letters. Tristram Shandy is unique in English literature—it stands sui generis for all time. There is scarcely any consecutive narrative, and what there is is used merely as a peg on which to hang endless digressions. But while there are many faults of taste and morals, there are also genuine humor and pathos, and without Walter Shandy, Dr. Slop, the Widow Wadman, Yorick, Uncle Toby, and Corporal Trim, English literature would certainly be very much the poorer.
Hugh Kelly (1739-1777), born in Dublin, was the son of a publican and himself became a staymaker, a trade from which he developed through the successive stages of attorney's clerk, newspaper-writer, theatrical critic, and essayist, into a novelist and playwright. His novel, Memoirs of a Magdalen (1767), was translated into French. His first comedy, a sentimental one entitled False Delicacy (1768), achieved a remarkable success on the stage and was even a greater success in book form, 10,000 copies being sold in a year, so that its author was raised from poverty to comparative affluence. In addition, it gave him a European reputation, for it was translated into German, French, and Portuguese. Strange to say, his later comedies, A Word to the Wise, A School for Wives, and The Man of Reason, were practically failures, and the same is true of his tragedy, Clementina. Kelly ultimately withdrew from stage work, and for the last three years of his life practised as a barrister without, however, achieving much distinction in his new profession.
Charles Coffey (d. 1745), an Irishman, was the author of several farces, operas, ballad operas, ballad farces, and farcical operas, the best known of which was The Devil to Pay, or the Wives Metamorphosed (1731).
Henry Brooke (1703?-1783), a county Cavan man and the son of a clergyman, was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and afterwards studied law in London. Becoming guardian to his cousin, a girl of twelve, he put her to school for two years and then secretly married her. Of his large family of twenty-two children, three of whom were born before their mother was eighteen years old, but one survived him. Appointed by Lord Chesterfield barrack-master at Mullingar, Brooke afterwards settled in Co. Kildare. It was there that he wrote his celebrated work, The Fool of Quality, or the History of the Earl of Moreland (5 vols., 1766-1770), which won the commendations of men so widely different as John Wesley and Charles Kingsley. It is, indeed, a remarkable book, combining, as it does, many of the characteristics of Sterne, Mackenzie, Borrow, and George Meredith. It is not very well known nowadays, but it will always bear, and will well repay, perusal. Brooke also wrote a poem on Universal Beauty (1735) and the tragedies Gustavus Vasa (1739), the production of which was forbidden in London but which was afterwards staged in Dublin as The Patriot, and The Earl of Essex (1749), which was played both in London and in Dublin, and has been made famous by the parody of one line in it by Samuel Johnson. Another novel, Juliet Grenville, or the History of the Human Heart, published in 1774, was not nearly up to the standard of The Fool of Quality. Brooke was a busy literary man. He made a translation of part of Tasso, drafted plans for a History of Ireland, projected a series of old Irish tales, wrote one fragment in a style very like that subsequently adopted by Macpherson in his Ossian, and for a while was editor of the Freeman's Journal. In the beginning, Brooke was violently anti-Catholic; but, as time progressed, he became more liberal-minded, and advocated the relaxation of the penal laws and a more humane treatment of his Catholic fellow-countrymen. Like Swift and Steele, he fell into a state of mental debility for some years before his death. His daughter, Charlotte Brooke (1740-1793), deserves mention as a pioneer of the Irish literary revival, for she devoted herself to the saving of the stores of Irish literature which in her time were rapidly disappearing. One of the fruits of her labors was The Reliques of Irish Poetry, published in 1789. She also wrote Emma, or the Foundling of the Wood, a novel, and Belisarius, a tragedy.