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have won him the tribute of Dr Parr's fear and hatred; a tribute which he paid as duly as his assessed taxes. Publicly, indeed, he durst not touch him; for the horrid scourge which Horsley had wielded at one time, in questions of scholarship and orthodoxy, still resounded in his ears. But in his letters and conversation, Dr Parr fretted for ever at his eminence, and eyed him grudgingly and malignly; and those among his correspondents, who were not too generous and noble-minded to pay their court through his weaknesses, evidently were aware that a sneer at Bishop Horsley was as welcome as a basket of game. Sneers, indeed, were not the worst: there are to be found in Dr Parr's correspondence some dark insinuations, apparently pointed at Horsley, which involve a sort of charges that should never be thrown out against any man without the accompaniment of positive attestations. What may have been the tenor of that bishop's life and conversation, we do not take upon us to say. It is little probable, at this time of day, under the censorious vigilance of so many unfriendly eyes, and in a nation where even the persons upon the judicial bench exhibit in their private lives almost a sanctity of deportment, that a dignitary of the English church will err by any scandalous immorality. Be that however as it may, and confining our view to Horsley in his literary character, we must say, that he is far beyond the reach of Dr Parr's hostility. His writings are generally excellent: as a polemic and a champion of his own church, he is above the competition of any modern divine. As a theologian, he reconciles the nearly contradictory merits of novelty and originality with well-meditated or thodoxy: and we may venture to assert, that his Sermons produced the greatest impression, and what the

newspapers cali "sensation," of any English book of pure divinity, for the last century. In saying this we do not speak of the sale; what that might be, we know not; we speak of the strength of the impression diffused through the upper circles, as apparent in the reverential terms, which, after the appearance of that work, universally marked the sense of cultivated men in speaking of Bishop Horsley -even of those who had previously viewed him with some dislike in his character of controversialist. Let the two men be compared; not the veriest bigot amongst the Dissenters, however much he would naturally prefer as a companion, or as a subject for eulogy, that man who betrayed the interests of his own church to him who was its column of support and ornament, could have the hardihood to insinuate that Dr Horsley was properly, or becomingly, a mark for the scurrilities of Dr Parr. In what falls within the peculiar province of a schoolmaster, we think it probable (to make every allowance which candour and the simplicity of truth demand) that Dr Parr had that superior accuracy which is maintained by the practice of teaching. In general reach and compass of intelfect, in theology, in those mixed branches of speculative research which belong equally to divinity and to metaphysics, (as in the Platonic philosophy, and all which bears upon the profound doctrine of the Trinity,) or (to express the matter by a single word) in philosophic scholarship, and generally in vigour of style and thought, we suppose Horsley to have had, in the eyes of the public, no less than in the reality of the case, so prodigiously the advantage, that none but a sycophant, or a false friend, would think of suggesting seriously a comparison so disadvantageous to Dr Parr. But at all events, let the relations of merit be what they

We shall have an opportunity farther on of shewing what was Parr's conduct to the church of which he professed himself a member, and in what sense he could be said to have betrayed it. At present we shall protect ourselves from misconstruction, by saying that his want of fidelity to the rights and interests of the church was not deliberate or systematic; in this, as in other things, he acted from passion-often from caprice. He would allow only this or that doctrine of the church to be defended; he would ruinously limit the grounds of defence: and on these great questions, he gave way to the same rank personal partialities, which, in the management of a school, had attracted the notice, and challenged the disrespect, of boys.

may in Horsley, certainly his absolute merit is unquestionable; and the continued insults of Dr Parr are insufferable.

Upon these flagrant justifications, individual attacks past counting, besides a general system of disparagement and contumely towards the most distinguished pretensions in church and state, unless ranged on the side of the Whigs, or even if presuming to pause upon those extremities which produced a schism in the Whig club itself, we stand for a sufficient apology in pressing the matter strongly against Dr Parr. A rejoinder on our side has in it something of vindictive justice. Tories, and not Tories only, but all who resist anarchists, (for that Dr Parr did not blazon himself in that character, was due to the lucky accident which saved him from any distressing opportunities of acting upon his crazy speculations,) have an interest in depressing to their proper level those who make a handle of literature for insidious party purposes, polluting its amenities with the angry passions proper to our civil dissensions, and abusing the good-nature with which we Tories are always ready to welcome literary merit, without consideration of politics, and to smile upon talent though in the ranks of our antagonists. The Whigs are once more becoming powerful, and we must now look more jealously to our liberalities. Whigs are not the kind of people to be trusted with improper concessions: Whigs " rampant," (to use Dr Parr's word,) still less. Had Dr Parr been alive at this hour, he would have stood fair for the first archbishopric vacant; for we take it for granted that the Duke of Wellington, according to his peculiar system of tactics, would long ere now have made him a bishop. Let us therefore appraise Dr Parr; and to do this satisfactorily, let us pursue him through his three characters, the triple role which he supported in life -of Whig politician; secondly, of scholar, (or, expressing our meaning in its widest extent, of literary man;) and finally, of theologian.

These questions we shall discuss in a separate paper; and, from the many personal notices which such a discussion will involve, and the great range of literary topics which it will

oblige us to traverse, we may hope to make it not unamusing to our readers. There are, in every populous community, many different strata of society, that lie in darkness, as it were, to each other, from mere defect of mutual intercourse; and in the literary world there are many chambers that have absolutely no communication. Afterwards, when twenty

thirty-sixty years have passed away-by means of posthumous memoirs, letters, anecdotes, and other literary records-they are all brought in a manner face to face; and we, their posterity, first see them as making up a whole, of which they themselves were imperfectly conscious. Every year makes further disclosures; and thus a paradox is realized that the more we are removed from personal connexion with a past age of literature, the better we know it. Making Dr Parr for the moment a central figure to our groups, we shall have it in our power to bring upon the stage many of the persons who figured in that age as statesmen, or leaders in political warfare; and most of those who played a part, prominent or subordinate, in literature; or who conspicuously filled a place amongst the civil and ecclesiastical dignitaries of the state.

Meantime, as an appropriate close to this preliminary paper, we shall put a question-and, in a cursory way, we shall discuss the proper answer to it-upon Dr Parr as a man of the world, and ambitious candidate for worldly distinctions; in short, as the architect of his fortunes. Was he, in this light, an able and successful man? Or, separating the two parts of that question which do not always proceed concurrently, if he were not successful in a degree corresponding to his own wishes and the expectations of his friends, if it is notorious that he missed of attaining those prizes which he never hesitated to avow as the objects that stimulated his ambition, in what degree are we to ascribe his failure to want of talent, to misdirection of his talent, to a scrupulous and fastidious integrity, to the injustice of his superiors, or, finally, to mere accidents of ill luck? One man in each ten thousand comes into this world, according to the homely saying, "with a silver spoon in his

mouth;" but most of us have a fortune to make a station to create. And the most general expression, by far the most absolute and final test, of the degrees in which men differ as to energy and ability, is to be found in the large varieties of success which they exhibit in executing this universal object. Taking life as a whole, luck has but little sway in controlling its arrangements. Good sense and perseverance, prudence and energy, these are the fatal deities that domineer over the stars and their aspects. And when a man's coffin knocks at the gates of the tomb, it is a question not unimportant, among other and greater questions, What was he on beginning life, what is he now? Though in this, as in other things, it is possible to proceed in a spirit of excess, still, within proper restrictions, it is one even of a man's moral obligations, to contend strenuously for his own advancement in life; and as it furnishes, at the same time, a criterion as little ambiguous as any for his intellectual merits, few single questions can be proposed so interesting to a man's reputation, as that which demands the amount of his success in playing for the great stakes of his profession or his trade. What, then, was the success of Dr Parr ?

The prizes which the Doctor set before his eyes from his earliest days, were not very lofty, but they were laudable; and he avowed them with a naïveté that was amusing, and a frankness that availed at least to acquit him of hypocrisy. They were two-a mitre and a coach-and-four. "I am not accustomed," says he, (writing to an Irish bishop,)" to dis semble the wishes I once had" [this was in 1807, and he then had them more than ever]" of arriving at the profits and splendour of the prelacy, or the claims to them which I believe myself to possess." The bishopric he did not get; there he failed. For the coach-and-four, he was more fortunate. At the very latest period of his life, when the shades of death were fast gathering about him, he found himself able to indulge in this luxury-and, as his time was obviously short, he wisely resolved to make the most of it; and upon any or no excuse, the Doctor was to be n flying over the land at full gal

lop, and scouring town and country with four clerical-looking long-tailed horses. We believe he even meditated a medal, commemorating his first ovation by a faithful portrait of the coach and his own episcopal wig in their meridian pomp; he was to have been represented in the act of looking out of the window, and "inflicting his eye" upon some hostile parson picking his way through the mud on foot. On the whole, we really rejoice that the Doctor got his coach and his four resounding coursers. The occasional crack of the whip must have sounded pleasantly in his ears at a period when he himself had ceased to operate with that weapon-when he was no more than an emeritus professor, and pasilo pogos no longer. So far was well; but still, we ask, how came it that his coach panels wanted their appropriate heraldic decoration? How was it that he missed the mitre ?Late in life, we find him characterising himself as an "unpreferred, calumniated, half-starving country parson;" no part of which, indeed, was true; but yet, we demand,How was it that any colourable plea existed, at that time of his career, to give one moment's plausibility to such an exaggeration ? Let us consider.

Dr Parr was the son of a country practitioner in the humbler departments of medicine. Parr, senior, practised as a surgeon, apothecary, and accoucheur. From him, therefore, his son could expect little assistance in his views of personal aggrandizement. But that was not necessary. An excellent Latin scholar, and a man who brought the rare sanction (sanctification-we were going to say) of clerical co-operation and countenance to so graceless and reprobate a party as the Whigs, who had scarcely a professional friend to say grace at their symposia, must, with any reasonable discretion in the conduct of his life, have been by much too valuable an article on the Whig establishment to run any risk of neglect. The single clerk, the one sole reverend man of letters, who was borne upon their books, must have had a priceless value in the eyes of that faction-when "taking stock," and estimating their alliances. To them he must have been what the

Emperor of Morocco is to the collec. tor of butterflies. To have lost this value, to have forfeited his hold upon their gratitude, and actually to have depreciated as he grew older, and better known to the world-implies too significantly some gross misconduct, or some rueful indiscretions. The truth is this; and for Parr's own honour, lest worse things should be thought of him than the case really warrants, his friends ought to make it known though a man of integrity, he could not be relied upon: in a muster of forces, he was one of the few that never could be absolutely reckoned and made sure of. Neither did his scruples obey any known law he could swallow a camel, and strain at a gnat, and his caprice was of the most dangerous kind; not a woman's caprice, which is the mere mantling of levity, and readily enough obeys any fresh impulse, which it is easy to apply in an opposite direction. Dr Parr's caprices grew upon another stock; they were the fitful outbreaks of steady, mulish wrongheadedness. This was a constitutional taint, for which he was indebted to the accoucheur. Had the father's infirmity reached Dr Parr in his worldly career, merely in that blank neutral character, and affected his fortunes through that pure negative position of confessed incapacity to help him, which is the whole extent of disastrous influence that the biographical records ascribe to him -all would have been well. But the old mule overruled his son to the end of his long life, and controlled his reiterated opportunities of a certain and brilliant success, by the hereditary taint in the blood which he transmitted to him, in more perhaps than its original strength. The true name for this infirmity is, in the vulgar dialect, pig-headedness. Stupid imperturbable adherence, deaf and blind, to some perverse view that abruptly thwarted and counteracted his party, making his friends stare,

and his opponents laugh; in short, as we have said, pure pig-headedness,-that was the key to Dr Parr's lingering preferment: and, we believe, upon a considerate view of his whole course, that he threw away ten times the amount of fortune, rank, splendour, and influence that he ever obtained; and with no countervailing indemnity from any moral reputation, such as would attend all consistent sacrifices to high-minded principle. No! on the contrary, with harsh opposition and irritating expressions of powerful disgust from friends in every quarter-all conscious that, in such instances of singularity, Dr Parr was merely obeying a demon, that now and then mastered him, of wayward-restive-moody self-conceit, and the blind spirit of contradiction. Most of us know a little of such men, and occasionally suffer by such men in the private affairs of life-men that are unusually jealous of slights, or insufficient acknowledgments of their personal claims and consequence: they require to be courted, petted, caressed: they refuse to be compromised or committed by the general acts of their party: no, they must be specially consulted; else they read a lesson to the whole party on their error, by some shocking and revolting act of sudden desertion, which, from a person of different character, would have been considered perfidy._Dr Johnstone himself admits, that Parr was "jealous of attention, and indignant at neglect;" and on one occasion endeavours to explain a transaction of his life, by supposing that he may have been "hurried away by one of those torrents of passion, of which there are too many instances in his life."-Of the father, Parr obstetrical, the same indulgent biographer remarks, (p. 10,) that he was" distinguished by the rectitude of his principles;" and, in another place, (p. 21,) he pronounces him, in summing up his character, to have been " an honest, well-meaning,

* Page 307, vol. i.—The Doctor adds-" As in the lives of us all." But, besides that this addition defeats the whole meaning of his own emphasis on the word his, it is not true that men generally yield to passion in their political or public lives. Having adopted a party, they adhere to it; generally for good and for ever. And the passions, which occasionally govern them, are the passions of their party-not their own separate impulses as individuals.

Tory;" but, at the same time, confesses him to have been "the petty tyrant of his fireside,"-an amiable little feature of character, that would go far to convince his own family, that" rectitude of principles" was not altogether incompatible with the practice of a ruffian.

Tory, however, Parr, senior, was not: he was a Jacobite, probably for the gratification of his spleen, and upon a conceit that this arrayed him in a distinct personal contest with the House of Hanover; whereas, once confounded amongst the prevailing party of friends to that interest, as a man-midwife, he could hardly hope to win the notice of his Britannic Majesty. His faction, how ever, being beaten to their heart's content, and his own fortune all going overboard in the storm, he suddenly made a bolt to the very opposite party he ratted to the red-hot Whigs and the circumstances of the case, which are as we have here stated them, hardly warrant us in putting a very favourable construction upon his motives. As was the father, so was the son: the same right of rebellion reserved to himself, whether otherwise professing himself Jacobite or Whig; the same peremptory duty of passive obedience for those of his household; the same hot intemperances in politics; the same disdain of accountableness to his party leaders; and, finally, the same petty tyranny of the fireside." This last is a point on which all the biographers are agreed: they all record the uncontrollable ill temper and hasty violence of Dr Parr within his domestic circle. And one anecdote, illustrating his intemperance, we can add ourselves. On one occasion, rising up from table, in the middle of a fierce discussion with Mrs Parr, he took a carving knife, and applying it to a portrait of that lady hanging upon the wall, he drew it sharply across the jugular, and cut the throat of the picture from ear to ear, thus murdering her in effigy.

This view of Parr's intractable temper is necessary to understand his life, and in some measure to justify his friends. Though not (as he chose himself to express it, under a momentary sense of his slow progress in life, and the reluctant blossoming

of his preferment) "a half-starved parson," yet most unquestionably he reaped nothing at all from his long attachment to Whiggery, by comparison with what he would have reaped had that attachment been more cordial and unbroken, and had he, in other respects, borne himself with more discretion; and above all, had he abstained from offensive personalities. This was a rock on which Parr often wrecked himself. Things, and principles, and existing establishments, might all have been attacked with even more virulence than he exhibited, had his furious passions allowed him to keep his hands off the persons of individuals. Here lay one class of the causes which retarded his promotion. Another was his unbecoming warfare upon his own church. "I am sorry," said one of his earliest, latest, and wisest friends, (BishopBennet,)-"I am sorry you attack the church, for fear of consequences to your own advancement." This was said in 1792. Six years after, the writer, who had a confidential post in the Irish government, and saw the dreadful crisis to which things were hurrying, found it necessary to break off all intercourse with Dr Parr; so shocking to a man of principle was the careless levity with which this minister of peace, and his immediate associates, themselves in the bosom of security, amongst the woods of Warwickshire, scattered their fire-brands of inflammatory language through the public, at a period of so much awful irritation. Afterwards, it is true, that when the Irish crisis had passed, and the rebellion was suppressed, his respect for Parr as a scholar led him to resume his correspondence. But he never altered his opinion of Parr as a politician: he viewed him as a man profoundly ignorant in politics; a mere Parson Adams in the knowledge of affairs, and the real springs of political action, or political influence; but unfortunately with all the bigotry and violent irritability that belong to the most excited and interested partisan; having the passions of the world united with the ignorance of the desert; coupling the simplicity of the dove with the fierce instincts of the serpent.

The events of his life moved under

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