Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 43.djvu/221

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ments; he next travelled through Italy (playing at Naples in 1844) and Germany, where, at Leipzig in 1846, he made a prolonged stay, benefiting by his intercourse with Mendelssohn. In the following year he returned to Vienna, when he was appointed ‘Kammervirtuose’ to the emperor. He died at Vienna on 25 Jan. 1849. Parish-Alvars was unquestionably one of the most distinguished harpists of any period; in Vienna he was invariably known as ‘der Paganini der Harfe.’ He excelled in the production of novel effects, and as a composer his works take high rank among compositions for the harp. He enjoyed playing on the harp such works as Beethoven's and Hummel's pianoforte concertos, Spohr's violin compositions, and Chopin's studies, thereby exhibiting a want of taste from which most of his own compositions are singularly free. His works include: 1. Fantasias ‘L'Adieu,’ ‘La Danse des Fées’ (Op. 62 and 68). 2. Concertos in G minor, Op. 81; Op. 91 for two harps and orchestra; in E flat, Op. 98. 3. ‘Voyage d'un Harpiste en Orient’ (Op. 79), which contains part of his collection of eastern melodies.

[Dramatic and Musical Review, 1842, p. 123; Grove's Dict. of Music, passim; Brit. Mus. Cat. of Music, and authorities cited in the text.]

R. H. L.


PARK, ANDREW (1807–1863), poet, was born in Renfrew on 7 March 1807. Educated in the parish school and at Glasgow University, he entered in his fifteenth year a commission warehouse in Paisley. When about twenty years of age he became a salesman in a hat manufactory in Glasgow, and there he shortly afterwards started in business for himself. Unsuccessful in this venture, he for a time tempted fortune in London as a man of letters, but he returned to Glasgow in 1841, and, buying the book stock of Dugald Moore (1805–1841) [q. v.], made another fruitless experiment in business. Thenceforth he devoted himself mainly to literature. In 1856 he made an oriental tour, publishing the following year ‘Egypt and the East.’ Park died at Glasgow on 27 Dec. 1863, and was buried in the Paisley cemetery, where a monument, consisting of a bronze bust on a granite pedestal, was erected to his memory in 1867.

Park, while a lad in Paisley, published a sonnet sequence, ‘The Vision of Mankind.’ In 1834 appeared his ‘Bridegroom and the Bride,’ which enhanced his reputation. In 1843, under the pseudonym of ‘James Wilson, druggist, Paisley,’ he published ‘Silent Love,’ a graceful and effective poem, which was reissued in small quarto in 1845, with illustrations by Sir J. Noel Paton. The poem was translated into French by the Chevalier de Chatelain, and was very popular in America. ‘Veritas,’ a poem which appeared in 1849, is autobiographical in character. A collective edition of Park's works, with a quaint preface descriptive of a dream of the muses, was published in London in 1854. Although somewhat lacking in spontaneity and ease of movement, several of Park's lyrics have been set to music by Auber, Donizetti, and others.

[Rogers's Scottish Minstrel; Wilson's Poets and Poetry of Scotland.]

T. B.


PARK, HENRY (1745–1831), surgeon, son of a Liverpool surgeon, was born in that town on 2 March 1744–5, and received his early education under the Rev. Henry Wolstenholme. At fourteen he was placed with a surgeon at the Liverpool Infirmary, and when only seventeen had the care of a large number of French prisoners of war. He then went to London to enter upon an apprenticeship to Percival Pott [q. v.], and subsequently completed his studies at Paris and Rouen. In 1766, when he was about twenty-one, he settled in his native town, and in the following year was appointed surgeon to the infirmary, a post which he held for thirty-one years. He retired from work at the age of seventy-one, after a professional career of extreme activity, and with the deserved reputation of a bold, original, and successful practitioner. He is best remembered by his ‘Account of a New Method of Treating Diseases of the Joints of the Knee and Elbow,’ 1783, 8vo, which was translated into French in 1784 (Paris), and into Italian in 1792 (by Brera, Pavia). It was afterwards published with Moreau's ‘Cases of Excision of Carious Joints, with observations by J. Jeffrey,’ Glasgow, 1806. The operation which led to the writing of this book is described by the ‘Edinburgh Review’ (October 1872) as one of the greatest surgical triumphs of the time. Park died, near Liverpool, on 28 Jan. 1831.

He married, in 1776, the eldest daughter of Mr. Ranicar of West Leigh Hall, Leigh, Lancashire, by whom he had eight daughters and a son, John Ranicar Park [q. v.]

[Trans. Provincial Med. and Surg. Assoc. vii. 459; Picton's Memorials of Liverpool, 1875, ii. 237.]

C. W. S.


PARK or PARKES, JAMES (1636–1696), quaker, was either born or early settled on the borders of Wales, near Wrexham or Welshpool, where he grew up among the ‘in-