ages. It exemplifies the fulness and promptitude of Parr, his manly independence of spirit and speech, and his liberality in relation to Hurd, whom he had handled so roughly in the Dedication and Preface which we have mentioned above.

"The name of the Archbishop of York (Markham), who was then in ill health, having been alluded to, the Prince of Wales observed, 'I esteem Markham a much greater, wiser, and more learned man than Hurd, and a better teacher, and you will allow me to be a judge, for they were both my preceptors.'-'Sir,' said Dr. Parr, is it your Royal Highness's pleasure that I should enter upon the topic of their comparative merits as a subject of discussion?' 'Yes,' said the Prince.Then, sir,' said Dr. Parr, '1 differ entirely from your Royal Highness in opinion.' -As I knew them both so intimately,' replied the Prince, you will not deny that I had the power of more accurately appreciating their respective merits than you can have had. In their manner of teaching you may judge of my esti mation of Markham's superiority,-his natural dignity and authority, compared with the Bishop of Worcester's smoothness and softness, and I now add, with proper submission to your authority on such a subject, his experience as a schoolmaster, and his better scholarship.-Sir,' said Parr, your Royal Highness began this conversation, and if you permit it to go on, must tolerate a very different inference.'-' Go on,' said the Prince, I declare that Markham understood Greek better than Hurd; for when I read Homer, and hesitated about a word, Markham immediately explained it, and then we went on; but when I hesitated with Hurd, he always referred me to the Dictionary; I therefore conclude, he wanted to be informed himself.'—' Sir,' replied Parr, I venture to differ from your Royal Highness's conclusion. I am myself a schoolmaster, and I think that Dr. Hurd pursued the right method, and that Dr. Markham failed in his duty. Hurd desired your Royal Highness to find the word in the Lexicon, not because he did not know it, but because he wished you to find by search, and learn it thoroughly. Dr. Hurd was not eminent as a scholar, but it is not likely that he would have presumed to teach your Royal Highness without knowing the lesson himself.'-'Have you not changed your opinion of Dr. Hurd,' exclaimed the Prince, 'I have read a work in which you attacked him fiercely.'-'Yes, sir, I attacked him on one point, which I thought important to letters, and I summoned the whole force of my mind, and took every possible pains to do it well, for I consider Hurd to be a great inan. He is celebrated as such by foreign critics, who appreciate justly his wonderful acuteness, sagacity, and dexterity in doing what he has done with so small a stock of learning. There is no comparison, in my opinion, between Markham and Hurd as men of talents. Markham was a pompous schoolmaster.-Hurd was a stiff and cold, but correct gentleman. Markham was at the head of a great school, then of a great college, and finally became an Archbishop. In all these stations he had trumpeters of his fame, who called him great, though he published one Concio only, which has already sunk into oblivion. From a farm-house and a village school, Hurd emerged the friend of Gray, and a circle of distinguished men. While Fellow of a small college, he sent out works praised by foreign critics, and not despised by our own scholars. He enriched his understanding by study, and sent from the obscurity of a country village, a book, sir, which your royal father is said to have declared made him a Bishop. He made himself unpopular in his own profession, by the defence of a fantastical system. He has decryers-he had no trumpeters; he was great in and by himself; and perhaps, sir, a portion of that power and adroitness you have manifested in this debate, might have been owing to him.'"

In 1819, Doctor Parr paid his visit to Scotland, without a Boswell, and both went and returned with different dispositions and impressions from those of his predecessor, Johnson. The optimates of Edinburgh welcomed him as became his deserts and their reputation. "It was ever delightful to him," says Mr. Field, "to talk of the days of intense intellectual gratifica

tion which he passed at Edinburgh, and he seemed to entertain a higher opinion, if possible, than before, of the literary men who so well supported in their time, the honour reflected on their country by the fame of Hume, Robertson, Smith, Blair, and others. He often spoke with admiration of their great intellectual powers; or as he expressed it, their confounded strong heads." The chief of his literary friends at Edinburgh was Dugald Stewart, and with him he passed some time as his guest at Kinneil House. To judge from Stewart's letters, Parr not only won the homage of the fine understandings of the philosopher and his accomplished wife, but ingratiated himself with their hearts. According to Mr. Field, he did not admit or approve the system of mental philosophy which Stewart had embraced-he admired the researches of Hartley, and held the "Observations on Man" in the highest estimation. He designated, too, as invaluable, Brown's "Lectures on the Philosophy of the Mind." Professor Dalzel became one of his chief favourites. He ascribed superlative merit to the professor's Collectanea, and passed encomiums on his latinity. He was only once or twice in the company of Sir Walter Scott, whom he rather avoided, because he conceived him to be a political Proteus. We presume that this conception or prejudice had its influence on his literary judgment, for he much undervalued both the poetry and prose of the Author of Waverley, and pronounced sentence upon his fame as more brilliant than solid, in fact, a mere meteor. To Dugald Stewart, Parr transmitted a tract of more than one hundred pages, with thirty or forty notes, on the Sublime, to be introduced into the Professor's work on the Philosophy of the Mind. Stewart wished to publish it separately, on account of its magnitude and value; but it remains in manuscript for some enlarged edition of the Doctor's works. His executors consider it as a treasure of metaphysical thought and erudition.

Several chapters of the Memoirs are allotted to the domestic affairs of the Scholar. We shall speak of them as succinctly as possible. He had two daughters, of whom he lost the youngest in 1805. The other died in 1810, and left several children. Both were women of the most estimable qualities, and fondly beloved by the father. Within the space of three months, he followed to the grave his wife, a daughter, and a grandchild. In regard to his wife, she could not have been very bitterly regretted. The Reverend Mr. Field confesses that his friend suffered the same domestic evils as Socrates, but did not meet them with the same command of temper or perfection of patience. In one of the Parriana, it is related that the close economy of the lady was offensive to the school-boys, and her provincial dialect too grating to the ear of the Doctor-that he lamented that he had

not paid his addresses to the celebrated Miss Carter, whom he might have courted in Greek; while she did not deign to conceal her vexation at having accepted as a partner a queer pedant, instead of an East-India captain, who might have brought muslins and chintzes. The marriage of his eldest daughter was accompanied by contentions sorely painful, and led to a separation which debarred him, for several years, from the society of his grandchildren.

He had nearly completed his seventieth year, when he announced his intention of entering a second time into the conjugal state. His new spouse was a maiden lady "of suitable age,' who proved in all respects such a helpmate as he wanted. Dr. Middleton, who was his family physician for twenty years, states, that during this whole period, until 1820, he was never called to Parr himself but twice, and then merely in cases of slight indisposition. He adds that his patient's distemperature, whether of body or mind, always gave way to the influence of his pipe, "which operated like a charm." Early in the year 1820, however, he was attacked by violent erysipelas, with obstinate fever. When recovered from this serious malady, he returned too incautiously to the luxuries of his table, which his patrician admirers, of both sexes, persisted in supplying with game and titbits. To the remonstrances of his physician, he always replied "For seventy-three years my stomach has never complained; it knows nothing of your modern doctrine of dyspepsia. His last illness began on the 17th January 1825, and he expired on the 6th March following. His sufferings in this interval were excessive, but he bore them with the most edifying fortitude and Christian resignation. Shortly before his death, he dictated a letter to the Reverend Samuel Butler, in which he informed the Archdeacon that he had given "minute and plenary directions for his funeral," and requested him to preach "a short, unadorned funeral sermon;" adding-"say little of me, but be sure to say it well." He wrote a brief inscription for his tomb, ending thus

"Christian Reader!

"What doth the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love mercy, to be in charity with your neighbours, to reverence your holy Redeemer,

and to walk humbly with your God?"

Neither of Parr's biographers deserves credit for skill in the preparation of Memoirs. Their books are most awkwardly compounded; stuffed with sketches and panegyrics of others who have no title to the reader's attention; and swollen too with repetitions and contrarieties. From such a jumble it has not been easy to draw out even the imperfect outline or abstract which we have presented. We should have committed, in an unpardonable measure, the sin of prolixity, if we had included all the topics gustful for ourselves-Parr's interesting relations with Gerrald,

Wakefield, Roscoe, Porson, Romilly, Copleston, Lord Holland, and Dr. Magee; his peculiar theological opinions and clerical merits; the complicated and strange affair of the Bampton Lectures; his profound critical reviews and controversies, and his discriminative survey of the three learned professions. Dr. Johnstone has interspersed with his Memoirs, letters from Jones, Fox, Tweddell, Bennet, Copleston, Stewart, Adair, the Duke of Sussex, and others, which comprise much curious matter. There are two particularly, from Parr himself—one to Lord Holland, on the treatment of the Catholics; and the other to the Lord Archbishop of Dublin, Dr. Magee, on his sweeping charge of illiteracy against the Unitarians-which have a potent raciness in every line. Wherever learning and dialectics could be auxiliary to freedom and liberality, the thrice armed divine, historian and philosopher, leaped into the arena. He contended as a stalworth knight, equipped cap à piè, for American rights, the abolition of the slave trade, Catholic emancipation, full enfranchisement of the Dissenters, the education of the lower classes, and the legitimacy of the constitutionalists on the continent. He congratulated himself that he had lived to behold "the spirit of inquiry, of liberty, and improvement, pressing forward into action, in almost every part of the old and new world, and producing a vast accumulation of knowledge, virtue, and happiness among mankind." His memory was well said to be almost miraculous; it lost nothing that was ever committed to it;—he devoured, weekly, "shelves of books," without seeming to overload his faculties;-every thing that he read and heard incorporated itself with the mass of his intellectual forces, which he could bring immediately to bear on every occasion.

Dr. Johnstone, as one of his executors, promises to send forth more of his productions, and especially of his vast correspondence, and his "classical morsels," in case the present volumes be received with favour. We shall rejoice to see a selection made from his works, for publication in the United States. If people must eat paper and drink ink, (to employ one of his favourite figures), in order to replenish their intellects, we should much prefer such fare, the substantials and the dainties which he has provided, -to the crudities or the corruptions which come to us in most of the novels and memoirs that are bred in the London hot-beds. What with the fashionable offspring of the prolific military pens, the smattering of newfangled physical science which every writer of the day must cast into his pages, the emulous rapidity and indifference in composing for the press, the indefinite increase of loose periodical writing, the acceptance of ponderous dictionaries ratifying and perpetuating the adulteration of our language by the worst provincial idioms, we do not know, or rather we fear that we know too well, how soon we shall lose the good

old English sterling style, unless an antidote to these banes, like the highly finished performances of Parr, be furnished from time to time in the shape of a novelty. That towering observer often intimated his dread of the mischiefs, which he believed to be threatened by the prevalent habit of superficial and desultory reading under the imposing name of general knowledge. For real sustenance, he looked to the old masters, and to those of his contemporaries who appeared as authors, only when matured as scholars, and who then composed, as Apelles painted, for posterity.

Not the least curious part of his correspondence, is that which relates to his exquisite nicety in his literary labours, and his minute emendations of his text. He destroyed sheets because he perceived that "three succeeding paragraphs began with infinitive moods," and the word task occurred twice in two pages. He observes in one of his "fidgetty letters about stops and syllables"- -as Dr. Johnstone denominates them-"I feel the anxiety of Addison, who would cancel a sheet to alter a common particle; and it was by this particular care of his words that they put forth such beautiful blossoms and such delicious fruits." His friend Homer, under whose supervision his Preface to Bellendenus was printed in London, incurred trouble sufficient to craze any common brain. Commas, colons, and semicolons, were the subjects of many angry epistles. Parr, sensible of his tormenting exactions, wrote to his worthy corrector of the press -"Now, Homer, your patience will be so much exercised, that you will be fitted for married life; and if you have not your reward in this life by matrimony, you will, after bearing all the trials I put in your way, be qualified to contend with Job himself for half the share of his reward in another." He had composed many monumental inscriptions, yet after he was elected to write that of Johnson, he read nearly two thousand, not, as he says in one of his letters, for the petty drudgery of gleaning scattered phrases, but for the nobler end of familiarizing his ear, eye, and mind, to the general structure of the composition, and the proper selection of topics. The tribute to Johnson does not exceed fourteen or fifteen lines in the lapidary arrangement. Exception having been taken to the phrase probabili poetæ in that inscription, he consulted so many scholars, to justify its propriety, that a volume might be made of his letters on the point. We are reminded by this question, of the account in Aulus Gellius, of Pompey's application to the principal critics of Rome concerning the phrases Consul Tertium or Tertio, and the decision of Cicero-to whom, as umpire, the choice between Tertium and Tertio was finally left-that Pompey should use the abbreviation Tert., to avoid the possibility of incorrectness in a public inscription. In printing his speeches, the