a man has credit for nothing as his own. And this injury was, as we have said, critical: coming at the moment of Mr Badcock's claim, about which much doubt prevailed, and was likely to prevail, from the death of the only person who could effectually meet the denial of White, Dr Parr's claim at one and the same time authenticated itself and Badcock's.

Meantime Parr's claim was a true one. Mr Kett (so well known in Oxford by the name of Horse Kett, from his equine physiognomy) thus states the amount of Parr's contributions, and their value: "Whether I consider the solidity of the argument, the comprehension of thought, or the splendour of style, I think them, upon the whole, the most able and elegant parts of the lectures. In point of quantity they are considerable, as they are more than a fifth of the whole, without reckoning the corrected passages. But their intrinsic excellence is such, that any person, with such materials, might not only have obtained a great deal of present applause, but lasting fame. They are in the highest style of composition, as they are of a philosophical and refined cast, and make many of the other parts of the lecture with which they are connected appear nothing more than loose and florid declamation."

Laborious investigations, conferences, and explanations followed; in which, it appears to us, that Dr Parr behaved with little generosity, and White with much duplicity. One incident is remarkable: Dr Parsons of Baliol College, one of the arbitrators or referees, at length withdrew himself from the service he had undertaken, in so pointed a manner as to convince us that he also had very considerable rights of property in these lectures, which his honour or his kindness had obliged him to dissemble; and that, in some

one of Parr's reclamations, in making which he relied confessedly on a very vague recollection, or a still vaguer discrimination of styles, he had unintentionally been trespassing on ground which Parsons knew to be his own. This is our private opinion. To the parties interested never was any literary broil so full of vexation.* Cabals were fermenting in Oxford in the interest of White on the one hand, or of Dr Gabriel of Bath on the other: the public journals took up the affair, with their usual imperfect information: private characters suffered : old friendships were dissolved for ever: and, finally, no party reaped either profit or honour from this contest for the proportions of property in a book, which has long since been consigned to oblivion by the

world.

But, after all, the worst scandal of this transaction settled not upon any individual so much as upon the professional body of divines in general. That part of the correspondence which got abroad, admitted the public painfully behind the curtain, and exhibited the writers concerting their parts, and arranging their coups-de-théatre, in a manner but little creditable to their sincerity. They had the air at one time of attorneys, scheming to obtain a verdict for Christianity; at another, of martinets, arranging the draperies of their costume, or of figurantes, attitudinizing for effect. We must be particularly brilliant, says White, in that part where we attack Gibbon. Alas! for the ancient faith-the primitive devotion-that burned in the evangelists, martyrs, and reformers, in Hilarion or Paul, in Wycliffe or Luther! How little room did that allow for any thoughts about themselves! Dr Parr, however, was no party to this huckstering traffic of devotional feeling, or this manufacture of spiritual thunder. Hypocrisy

was not his failing: whatever were his religious opinions, his feelings of devotion were thoroughly sincere. But he suffered from the connexion in which his name appeared; and, as regarded the duties of a friend, his character has suffered in this transaction permanently, from his own indiscretions, and the infirmity of his too ungenerous vanity.

To sum up Dr Parr's pretensions as a man of letters, we have already sufficiently acknowledged that his talents were splendid, and fitted, under suitable guidance, to have produced a more brilliant impression on his own age than they really did, and a more lasting one on the next age than they ever will. In his lifetime, it is true, that the applauses of his many pupils, and his great political friends, to a certain extent, made up for all deficiencies on his own part; but now, when these vicarious props are withdrawn, the disproportion is enormous, and hereafter will appear to be more so, between the talents that he possessed and the effects that he accomplished. This result is imputable, in part, to his own want of exertion, and the indolence with which he shrank from undertaking any labour of great compass or research, the very best of his performances being mere velitations, skirmishes, or academic exercises; and in part, also, it is imputable to a cause less open to moral reproach, viz. the comparative poverty of his philosophic understanding, between which and his talents there was no equilibrium. He gave a bright and gaudy colouring to truths which were too often trite, mean, or self-evident. And the impression was ineradicable in a keen observer's mind, of a perpetual swell, glitter, and false inflation, beyond the occasion, and without a corresponding activity or power of thought. His architecture was barbaresque-rich in decoration, colossal in proportions, but unsymmetrical, and reposing on no massy foundations. It is very possible, and not uncommon, to have a poor understanding combined with fine talents. We do not say that Dr Parr's understanding was a poor one; but it was not emphatically a fine one, not habitually profound, not philosophically subtle. Unquestionably it was mismatched, in point of natu

ral vigour, with his talents-that is, his powers of giving effect to his thoughts, and realizing his conceptions. The splendours of Burke, yoked, as they were, with the very finest -subtlest-and most combining intellect, that ever yet has been applied to political philosophy, awoke no sense of disparity or false balance in his powers. But in the case of Parr, we feel that, having once tasted the luxury of his periodic sentences, with their ample volume of sound and self-revolving rhythmus-having enjoyed his artful antithesis, and solemn antilibration of cadences we have had the cream of his peculiar excellencies, and may exclaim with Juvenal, Venimus ad summum fortunæ, or with Romeo, that it is time to be gone, because" the sport is at the best."

As to that other cause, which cooperated to the effect we have been stating, Parr's indolence, or unpersevering industry-his excuse was the less, that his stomach was as strong as the shield of Telamonian Ajax, and his spirits, even under attacks of illness, were indomitable, and (as he himself styles them) " lion spirits." Heavens! what an advantage in that temperament above the general condition of literary men! Coleridge, for example, struggling with the ravages of opium for the last 30 years, and with the res angusta domi, in a degree never known to Parr, has contrived to print a dozen 8vo volumes. And were all his contributions to the Morning Post and Courier collected, and his letters, many and long, together with his innumerable notes on the fly-leaves and margins of books, he would appear to have been a most voluminous author, instead of meriting the reproach which too often we have been fated to hear, of shameful indolence and waste of stupendous powers. Of Dr Parr's very criminal indolence, there was but one palliation: Much of his life had passed in the labours of the school-room; and his leisure from those was excusably turned to purposes of relaxation. Still he had latterly a long period of immunity from toils of every kind; he had a library of above ten thousand volumes; he had increasing wealth; and, for years, he toiled not, neither did he spin. As

to his execrable hand-writing, that is rather an explanation than a justification of his sterility. Pretty often he had the aid of volunteer amanuenses; and was he at any time too poor to have paid a secretary? Beginning with some advantages for literary research so much beyond those of Gibbon, in his far greater familiarity with the languages of ancient books, why should Dr Parr, the apologist of universities against Gibbon, not have left behind him a monument of learned industry as elaborate and as useful as his? On the whole, we fear that Dr Parr, as an author, must always be classed with those who have spent their vigour upon ludicra, certamina, and sciomachiæ, mock fights, mimic rehearsals, and combats, with the momentary exha lations of party madness, rather than upon the "good fight" of a scholar and a Christian, in that eternal war which exists between ignorance and truth, between the world and pure religion; that his knowledge and the sweat of his brow have been laid out upon palaces of ice, incapable of surviving the immediate atmosphere under which they arose, and dissolving with the first revolution of the seasons, rather than upon the massy Roman masonry that might have sustained his influence to a distant posterity. This may seem his misfortune, but then it was a misfortune to have been foreseen. And, for the more intrinsic qualities of his works, it will be recorded in their very fate that, if their execution was sometimes such as to challenge a permanent interest, their matter was unable to support so great a distinction; and that perhaps, of all known works, they are best fitted to illustrate the critical objection of materiem superabat opus; and finally, with regard to their author, that hardly any writer of age so mature, of education so regular, and of pursuits so solemn and professional, had derived his subjects from occasions so ephemeral, or his excitement from motives so personal.

It remains that we should speak of Dr Parr as a politician and as a divine and fortunately the transcendent character of the facts will bring those inquests within the range of a short trial and a self-evident verdict.

First, as a politician. The French

Revolution found Dr Parr a Jacobin; found, we say, not made. Of this there is abundant presumption. To give his vote for Wilkes, he faced a situation of considerable risk; he was unwigged, and probably saved his life by escaping through a back window to his horse. Considering that he was then the Reverend Samuel Parr, this argued no trivial sympathy with the seditious agitator. It is true that a constitutional question was at issue in the case of Wilkes's expulsion; but it does not appear that Parr gave his countenance to Wilkes the purist of the constitution, so much as Wilkes the demagogue; and loved him upon the principle laid down by Junius, viz. so long as he was a thorn in the king's side." Besides, right or wrong in politics, ought an impure scoffer like Wilkes, notoriously the author of a most scandalous and obscene parody, to have commanded the volunteer and ardent support of a clergyman? Was this decent? Such however, were Parr's earliest attachments, and such the leonine ardour with which he displayed them. In a better cause we should have admired his courage; for he seems to have been resolved to go to Brentford, though there had been "as many devils there as tiles upon the roof."

Well, in the fulness of time came the French Revolution. The first persons to sing public pæans of congratulation in this country were the dissenters of Birmingham-moving under the domineering influence of Dr Priestley. What followed is known to all whose recollections stretch back to those tumultuous days. Dr Priestley's house was stormed and sacked by the Birmingham mob; his philosophical apparatus (as a private one, matchless) destroyed; his papers, letters, philosophical MSS. scattered to the four winds; and the angry philosopher himself, by a fierce levanter of indignation, driven west

wards to America. These scenes passed in too close neighbourhood to Dr Parr, for a temper so combustible as his to escape kindling at the flame of party fury. We may be sure also, that he took the side of Priestley: to the extent of pity for his misfortunes, all good men did so; but as an approver of the conduct which provoked these misfortunes, we may almost venture to say that, amongst

the fifteen thousand clergymen of the Church of England, Dr Parr stood altogether alone. Every man of sober mind, whilst he commiserated Dr Priestley as an unfortunate man, and esteemed him as a very ingenious one, could view him in no other light than as the victim of his own folly and misguided passions. Political frenzy had prompted him to acts of defiance against a mob as fanatical in one direction as himself in another; with this difference, however, that their fanaticism pointed to a very much more seasonable policy than the fanaticism of the celebrated experimentalist. The mob had retorted as an insulted and irritated mob are likely to retort. They, who play at bowls, must expect rubbers. And Dr Parr, by mixing in the game, wantonly drew upon himself a participation in the danger-or at least a participation in the terror; for, after all, he seems to have been more frightened than seriously hurt. Great was his panic; schooled by Dr Priestley's losses, he sent off his books hastily to Oxford. They suffered from the hasty removal; and at Oxford, where they were indifferently sheltered, they suffered still more. This lesson might have done him good service, had his temper allowed him to profit by it. But neither fear nor interest could ever check his fanaticism. With such a temper we may suppose that he was blinded to all sense of his own errors by the dazzling light with which his anger invested the errors of the opposite party. At an after period, the Doctor's cries ascended to heaven in print against the mob and their criminal politics. Yet such is the temper of this world-that, if a grave philosopher, by shaking his fist, and other acts of bravado, should happen to provoke a company of unlucky boys to reply with a shower of stones, people in general suffer their resentment to settle upon the philosopher for his wanton provocation, rather than on the boys for that lapidary style of retort in which their skill naturally expresses itself.

This affair, taken singly, being mixed up with considerations of person and neighbourhood, might, after all, but indifferently represent the condition of Dr Parr's politics. Other ebullitions of his feelings about the same period were less equivocal. On

Mr Burke, for the crime of writing his memorable book on the French Revolution, he inflicted the whimsical punishment of inverting his portrait-that is, suspending it with the head downwards. The insolent tyranny of this act is remarkable. Mr Burke had held up his "protesting hand" against the Revolution; and he, if ever any man upon any question, had explained the philosophic grounds of his protest. It seemed, therefore, that with or without reasons, no dissent was tolerated from Dr Parr's views. For, as to Mr Burke's vehemence, it was no more than the natural warmth of sincerity. Precisely the same sentence of degradation, we believe, was executed upon Mr Windham, and for the same offence. This was intelligible, and equity, if not justice. Equal acts merited equal treatment. But in a third case the same degradation, by greatly extending the construction of guilt, warranted much larger inferences against Dr Parr's motives. This third criminal was Paley; on his portrait, also, sentence of inversion was passed and executed, and for years it hung at Hatton in that position. What then had been Paley's crime? Audi facinus majoris abolla; he had literally been guilty of writing Reasons for Contentment. The title explains its object. At a crisis of universal political irritation, when Paine's works and the French Revolution had diffused a spirit of change, and the indefeasible evils of poverty were made handles of disaffection-being charged upon the institutions of the land, Dr Paley had exerted himself to dissipate all delusions, to rouse the ignorant to a sense of the awful blessings which they enjoyed under equal laws administered by a popular government, and thus to save them as well from secret discontents as from publicly lending themselves to the purposes of designing incendiaries. This was the service which he did, or attempted; and for this only, neither more nor less, he incurred the wrath of Parr; we may add that he was never forgiven. The following record of his feelings, in regard to Paley, he left behind him for publication:-"I never thought Paley an honest man; he had great sagacity, wit, and science; some good humour; but he was vain, inconsist

ent," [odd objections to come from Samuel Parr :] he was also, it appears * ** [i. e. something too bad for Parr's executors to print,] " and selfish."

No one fact can better illustrate the furious disaffection of Dr Parr. Simply because a man applied his great talents to a purpose of the highest charity, which could no otherwise serve the existing ministers even remotely and mediately, than by first of all serving many thousands of his humble countrymen directly and essentially, he became with Dr Parr a marked man. After this it will not be surprising that even the Whiggish correspondents of Parr found occasion to remind him that England was not the country in sober sadness which it suited their party tactics to represent; that he was interpreting too literally the violences of their public polemics; and that England did in fact continue to be, what she had so long been esteemed by all the world, except her eternal enemies, the ark to which were confided the dearest interests of

man.

In 1794, war had begun to rage; the revolutionary frenzy had produced its bloodiest excesses; the gloom had terrifically deepened; and the French reign of terror, by a very natural re-action on all the rest of Europe, produced a corresponding system of vigilance and coercion in all regular governments, which must now be admitted to have been too harsh and despotic, if viewed apart from the extremities of the occasion. Upon questions, which depend for their adjudication upon the particular estimate which is taken of the impending dangers, there is room for great latitude of opinion amongst honest men. Constitutionally, and from mere differences of bodily temperament, men of the sanest judgments take radically different views of the very broadest cases that can arise; and starting as he did from Whiggish principles, Dr Parr is entitled to a large indulgence in his construction and valuation of Mr Pitt's policy. We can allow, therefore, most readily for the fervour of interest which he took, not merely as a private friend to some of the parties concerned, but also as a politician, in

the state trials which occurred at that period. For poor Gerrald, as a splendid pupil of his own, as an unfortunate man betrayed into calamity by generous enthusiasm, and as a martyr of most disinterested indiscretions, he was entitled to feel the very warmest concern. We ourselves, of principles so adverse to Dr Parr's, are of opinion that Gerrald was most harshly, nay, unconstitutionally, treated. He was tried under a superannuated law of Scotland, which had arisen out of another condition of things, and was never meant for our times; it was a mere accident that such a law should be unrepealed; and a verdict was obtained against him that the rest of the empire could not have countenanced. This was a case beyond any other to merit a pardon, even in the view of those who thought Mr Gerrald a turbulent democrat, since undoubtedly the verdict was in some measure obtained surreptitiously. Conduct that, on one side the Border, was punishable with transportation; on the other, was confessedly, at the very utmost, a misdemeanour. Under these circumstances, to have enforced the sentence, and to have thrown a man of genius and a scholar into the society of ruffians, and the very refuse of jails-was doubtless a harsh course. Warmth, therefore, and earnestness might be expected from Dr Parr, in behalf of his unhappy friend. But nothing short of childish defect of self-government, could have allowed Dr Parr to insult the very person to whom he looked for a mitigation of the sentence. Yet this he did. Writing to Mr Windham, as Secretary of State, for the exertion of his influence with Mr Pitt, he told him with a bullying air that Mr Gerrald was as able a man as Mr Pitt, and a great deal more learned. What folfowed? Mr Windham had been acquainted with the Doctor, and was the very man to have felt for the peculiar hardship of Mr Gerrald's case. But of an application in this spirit he could not allow himself to take any favourable notice; a formal official answer was returned; and Mr Gerrald's sentence was permitted to take its course. From this we infer, that Dr Parr's political enthusiasm had then risen to the height