THE QUARTERLY REVIEW. ART. I.-The Works of Samuel Parr, LL.D., Prebendary of St. Paul's, Curate of Hatton, &c.; with Memoirs of his Life and Writings, and a Selection from his Correspondence. By John Johnstone, M.D., Fellow of the Royal Society and of the Royal College of Physicians of London, &c. In 8 vols. London. 1828. WE E have seldom seen a character more difficult to decypher than that of Dr. Parr. There is so much in him to admire, and so much to reprobate; so much to reverence, and so much to ridicule; so much wisdom, and so much prejudice ;-the generosity of a man conscious of merit indisputable, mixed with the jealousy of a man of mere pretensions-that his image is only the antitype of that in Nebuchadnezzar's dream, of which the head was of fine gold and the feet of clay. It was unfortunate for Parr, and for the world too, that his great powers (for none can deny that great powers he had) were never directed to one great object. He had vast strength, but never seems to have discovered wherein it lay. How many a fine mind has been lost to mankind by the want of some propitious accident, to lead it to a proper channel; to prevent its current from turning awry and losing the name of action!' We know not whether the story of Newton's apple be true, but it may serve for an illustration, and if that apple had not fallen, where would have been his Principia? If the Lady Egerton had not missed her way in a wood, Milton might have spent the time in which he wrote Comus,' in writingAccidence of Grammar;' and if Ellwood, the quaker, had not asked him what he could say on Paradise Regained,' that beautiful poem (so greatly underrated) would have been lost to us. Parr had a mass of raw material in his mind, which he never found the means of properly working up; excellent in itself, but often not to the purpose for which he used it. His bells are continually jingling out of tune. His politics intrude on his theology, his learning on his politics, his metaphysics on both. The good people at Hatton are lectured on the critical meaning of a Hebrew word ;* the Lord Mayor of London, on the metaphysics of benevolence;† Mr. Coke, of Norfolk, on Regeneration and the danger of fanaticism. Now all this was a misapplication of power. There was *Vol. v. p. 148. + Vol. ii. p. 361. Vol. iv. pp. 547,548. VOL. XXXIX. NO. LXXVIII. S wanting wanting to Dr. Parr the prosecution of some one theme, which should have drawn forth his heterogeneous possessions, as into a web. Several works which would have answered such a purpose were suggested to him; some he had actually undertaken. In philology, e. g. he might have done anything, and he knew it; but he was content to waste his treasures on desultory dissertations in the course of his immense correspondence with his friends. Dr. Copleston reminded him, that such stores as he had laid up in this department of learning might be employed in the service of metaphysics, and be the means of elucidating many a difficulty in the highest department of philosophy.* But Parr was deaf. The scope afforded him for etymological investigation, by his masterly knowledge of that most subtle of all languages, the Greek,—a language which can seize upon whatever is abstract as readily as if it were an object of sense, and discriminate between ideas which differ but by a shade; which can give a name to the most 'airy nothings,' and exhibit in its mere self, as in a most delicate mirror, the progressive history, the local customs, the peculiar habits of thinking, of a people sensitive and mercurial beyond every other-the scope thus afforded him might have been filled up by The Diversions of Hatton,' which should have rivalled The Diversions of Purley;' and, if it would have been any consolation to him to know it, the scholar would have most gladly purchased such a work from Parr, even at the price of its being encumbered (as it probably would have been) with political reflections, as edifying and appropriate as those which hang like a millstone about the work of Horne Tooke. The turn of Parr's mind for such speculations upon Greek, whether metaphysical or physical, may be remarked in the use which he makes of his philology in his argument on benevolence,† and in his ingenious exposition of St. Paul's change of metaphors in several of his epistles, according to the local circumstances of the people to whom they were addressed. In biography, again, Parr might have been distinguished. The few sketches of character he has left make us regret that they are so few. Prejudice may warp them sometimes, and so it fared with those of Johnson, but they are vivid, bold, comprehensive, discriminative-the portraits, in short, of a superior artist. Dr. Bennet, the Bishop of Cloyne, who was at all times his good genius, apprized him that this was his province; but in vain. Here he might have found a suitable field for the display of all his knowledge, original and acquired, as Nichols did in his life of Bowyer, or Middleton in that of Cicero; and instead of a series of disjointed tracts, and notes Vol. vi. p. 46. Vol. vii. p. 66. + Vol. vi. p. 498. upon upon the tracts, and notes upon the notes, which few will read, and still fewer retain, we might have had a work which should have vied in popularity with the Lives of the Poets, by his great prototype. In a life of Sumner, for instance, he might have found a vent for all his notions upon education, upon discipline, upon the advantages and defects of our public schools and universities. In a life of Johnson, he might most properly have unloaded himself of his lucubrations on superstition and atheism, on toleration and intolerance, on the origin of ideas, on the origin of evil, on all which constitutes the proper study of mankind.' In a life of Sir W. Jones, he might have indulged his taste for philology, (if the former work on this subject, at which we hinted, had not exhausted him,) his taste for law, for reform, for investigation of the principles of government; shedding, meanwhile, over all, that glow of fervent affection which he felt for his early friend, and the like to which makes the Life of Savage, (for we are far from hinting any resemblance between the two subjects of the biographers,) however it may have distorted it, the most delightful, perhaps, of all Johnson's productions. In a life of Cullen, he might have embodied his extensive medical reading; producing from his favourite ancients, proofs of their possessing much greater knowledge of the healing art than modern practitioners give them credit for; confuting those errors of materialism, which are said to cleave so often to the anatomist, and which Parr's intimate knowledge of Bishop Butler, and devotion to his school of theology, would have qualified him for confuting so well; exhibiting, if he pleased, in Dr. Priestley (whose praises might have been more appropriate in such a dissertation than in a sermon from a pulpit of the church of England,) an example that it is possible to be even a materialist without being an infidel; and holding up to the young, and often ill-informed, students of our hospitals, the bright examples of a Sydenham and a Boerhaave, as men who could unite the highest medical talent with the soundest religious belief; who could see the hand of God in the mechanism of our bodies, the blessings of a revelation in the comfort it administers to the sick and suffering, and no mean argument for its truth in the strong aspirations after the views it unfolds, which crowd upon every man as he enters the valley of the shadow of death.” To a gentleman of this noble profession, himself an honour to it, at once a man of letters and of skill, possessing what has been ever esteemed the highest claim to public gratitude the claim ob cives servatos-whose hospitality Parr enjoyed whilst in health, whose assistance he received in his sickness, and whom he addressed in his dying hour as his most dear friend;' to this physician' have the family of Parr consigned the office of embalming their father.' 6 $ 2 'For เ For defects of style,' says Dr. Johnstone, in his preface, ' for errors of opinion, and for the general conduct of my work, I might, perhaps, offer some reasons, which would excuse, and some which would absolve, many imperfections. For the opinions I will make no apology-they were Parr's. For the rest, I am neither so vain as to imagine that that which was meant well has been altogether done well, nor so weak as to despond about the success of my endeavours. I have done my best, in the midst of pressing, and anxious, and unceasing engagements; and whatsover may be the judgment passed on my work, I shall always have the satisfaction and the consciousness of feeling that I strove to be just and faithful to the memory of my friend.'-vol. i. p. v. He was the guide of my youth,' adds Dr. Johnstone, in another place, and the constant friend of my life. For thirty-five years I have seen him in numberless varieties of our imperfect condition. I have rejoiced with him in prosperity and health, I have sympathised with him in sickness and sorrow: we have travelled together the wearisome road of life, in narrow circumstances and in abundance, and throughout our course our confidence was mutual. I feel, therefore, that I have a right to assume a knowledge of the character of Dr. Parr.'-vol. i. p. viii. We are sure that more than this is not wanted to recommend Dr. Johnstone's work to the favourable attention of every reader. He writes with freedom and spirit; he defends Parr's honest fame with the jealousy of a zealous friend, perhaps, too, of a political partisan; yet he frankly withstands him to the face when he thinks that he is to be blamed. Samuel Parr was born at Harrow on the Hill, June 15 (O.S.), 1747. He was the son of Samuel Parr, a surgeon and apothecary of that place, and through him immediately descended from several considerable scholars, and remotely (as one of his biographers, Mr. Field, asserts) from Sir W. Parr, who lived in the reign of Edward IV., and whose granddaughter was Queen Catharine Parr, of famous memory. It does not appear from Parr's writings (as far as we remember) that he laid claim to this high ancestry; yet the name of Catharine, which he gave to one of his daughters, may be imagined to imply as much. His mother, whose maiden name was Mignard, was of the family of the celebrated painter. It was the accident of Parr's birth-place that, probably, laid the foundation of his fame, for to the school of his native village, then one of the most flourishing in England, he was sent in his sixth year; whilst, under other circumstances, it is likely that he would have been condemned to an ordinary education and his father's business. So many seeds is Nature constantly and secretly scattering, in order that one may fall upon a spot that shall foster it into a plant. In his boyhood, he is de scribed He scribed by his sister, Mrs. Bowyear, as studious after his kind, delighting in Mother Goose and the Seven Champions, and not partaking much in the sports usual to such an age. He had a very early inclination for the church, and the elements of that taste for ecclesiastical pomp, which distinguished him in after life, appeared when he was not more than nine or ten years old. He would put on one of his father's shirts for a surplice, (till Mr. Sanders, the vicar, supplied him, as Hannah did his sake, with a little gown and cassock;) he would then read the church service to his sister and cousins, after they had been duly summoned by a bell tied to the banisters; preach them a sermon, which his congregation was apt to think, in those days, somewhat of the longest; and even, in spite of his father's remonstrances, would bury a bird or a kitten (Parr had always a great fondness for animals) with the rites of christian burial. Samuel was his mother's darling; she indulged all his whims, consulted his appetite, and provided hot suppers for him almost from his cradle. was her only son, and was at this time very fair and well-favoured. Providence, however, foreseeing that at all events vanity was to be a large ingredient in Parr's composition, sent him, in its mercy, a fit of small-pox; and, with the same intent, perhaps, deprived him of a parent, who was killing her son's character by kindness. Parr never was a boy, says, somewhere, his friend and schoolfellow, Dr. Bennet. When he was about nine years old, Dr. Allen saw him sitting on the churchyard gate at Harrow, with great gravity, whilst his school-fellows were all at play. Sam, why don't you play with the others?' cried Allen. Do not you know, Sir,' said he, with vast solemnity, that I am to be a parson?' And Parr himself used to tell of Sir W. Jones, another of his school-fellows, that as they were one day walking together near Harrow, Jones suddenly stopped short, and, looking hard at him, cried out, Parr, if you should have the good luck to live forty years, you may stand a chance of overtaking your face.' Between Bennet, Parr, and Jones, the closest intimacy was formed; and though occasionally tried, it continued to the last. Sir W. Jones, indeed, was soon carried, by the tide of events, far away from the other two, and Dr. Bennet quickly shot a-head of poor Parr in the race of life, and rose to the Irish bench; but 6 • Memor Actæ non alio rege puertiæ, the man and the bishop is still, in his intercourse with Parr, (and we meet with many beautiful proofs of it in these volumes,) the Harrow schoolboy, ripened, indeed, by years and by the experience resulting from high station in turbulent times, yet retaining the |