Author: Parsons, William
Biography:
PARSONS, William (d 1828: GM)
In 1816 Watkins described Parsons as “a gentleman of fortune who resided long in Italy” and who was best known for his contributions to the Della Cruscan circle, in association with Robert Merry and Hester Piozzi (qq.v.), but who had published a few further poetry titles on his own account. That remains almost as much as is known of him. According to another contemporary, David Rivers, he engaged in a futile newspaper war with William Gifford (q.v.) over Gifford’s satires of the group. He was, by internal evidence, a classically educated man with unfulfilled literary ambitions. His first separate publication—at eight pages, excluded from this bibliography—appears to have been an Elegy written at Florence (1785), published in Geneva. If, as seems probable, he was a young man on his Grand Tour from 1784 to 1786, he might have been born in the early 1760s, but no reliable records have been found. He followed up his Florentine ventures with a Poetical Tour . . . by a Member of the Arcadian Society at Rome (1787) which was published in London. Thereafter he presumably divided his time between Britain and the Continent. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in Nov. 1787. His poem to a boy at Eton (pro-Eton, anti-Gray) was addressed to the son of his Della Cruscan friend Bertie Greatheed (q.v.); Parsons probably remained unmarried. The occasional poems in his final collection, Travelling Recreations (1807) are dated from all over the place: Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Ireland, etc. One, dated 1800, represents the author as a student of chemistry at the University of Edinburgh—in short, a dilettante. He died in Sloane St., London, on 15 Jan. 1828. (GM Jan. 1828, 92; ODNB 25 Aug. 2023; Watkins, 264; Rivers, 2:115; ancestry.com 25 Aug. 2023; findmypast.com 25 Aug. 2023; Royal Society Record #NA2760, catalogues.royalsociety.org) HJ