'never knew that he spoke cavalierly except to his wife. I 'never exchanged a syllable with him. At Parr's I converse ' only with Parr.' Somewhat unconsciously a characteristic trait is here let drop, of which there is accurate illustration in one of his brother's letters. Referring to what was certainly true of Landor to the last, that, with noble bursts of energy in his talk, his temperament disqualified him for anything like sustained reasoning, and he instinctively turned away from discussion or argument, his brother had mentioned having seen him in his youth rush from the table of one of his own political friends, provoked by some slight contradiction that appeared disrespectful, when in truth there was no disrespect, but only a slight difference, threatening controversy. It was from Dr. Parr's table,' Mr. Robert Landor replied to my farther inquiry, 'that he rushed so furiously; but not in anger with the Doctor, whom he always liked, and with whom he never quarrelled. His anger 'was provoked by a Warwick physician whom he met there-a 'Dr. Winthrop-who felt astonished at the offence he had given. 'A very feeble reasoner who could govern his temper might be 'sure of victory over one, ten times his superior, who could not. Some slight interruption, even a smile, was provocation enough, if there were many witnesses present at the controversy, to de'cide it.' His own assertion that at Parr's he never conversed but with Parr is made quite intelligible to us by this comment. Yet his intercourse with the old liberty-loving scholar and divine was very much the happiest, and far from the least profitable, of this period of his life; and it continued, without abatement of regard on either side, for many years.

Before account is given of it, one more opinion of Gebir shall be interposed. It anticipates my narrative by a few years, but expresses with singular vividness the fascination with which the poem seized from time to time on minds of the highest order, the attention thereby directed to its author from men whose notice constituted fame, and the degree of compensation so afforded by the few for the persistent neglect and dislike of the many.

Four years before Gebir appeared Shelley was born, and its influence over him at more than one period of his life is recorded by his wife in her edition of his poems. When he was at Ox

ford in 1811, we are told by the friend and fellow-collegian who was most intimate with him there, he would at times read nothing else; and Mr. Hogg relates that on the frequent occasions when he found him so occupied, it was hopeless to draw his attention away. There was something in the poem which in a peculiar manner caught his fancy. He would read it aloud to others, or to himself, with a tiresome pertinacity. One morning his friend went into his rooms to tell him something of importance, but he would attend to nothing but Gebir; whereupon Hogg describes himself with a young impatience snatching the book 'out of the obstinate fellow's hand,' and throwing it through the open window into the quadrangle; but unavailingly; for, as it fell upon the grass-plat and was brought presently back by the servant, again Shelley became absorbed in it, and the something of importance had to wait to another time. I related this in'cident at Florence,' adds Mr. Hogg, 'some years afterwards, and ' after the death of my poor friend, to the highly-gifted author. He heard it with his hearty, cordial, genial laugh. "Well, "you must allow it is something to have produced what could ""please one fellow-creature, and offend another, so much.””

Nothing has been said of Gebir better than that; and when correct adjustment can be made of the relative values of praise and censure received by it, from those it so greatly pleased and those it so much offended, its place may at last be accurately ascertained.

II. DOCTOR PARR AND THE CRITICS.

In the first article written by Sydney Smith in the Edinburgh Review he reproachfully called attention to the fact that by far the most learned man of his day was languishing on a little paltry curacy in Warwickshire. This was Doctor Parr, whose name at the beginning of the century, little as it is now remembered

• Life of Shelley, i. 201. ‘I regret,' Mr. Hogg concludes, 'that these two intellectual persons were not acquainted with each other. If I could 'confer a real benefit upon a friend, I would procure for him, if it were possible, the friendship of Walter Savage Landor.'

Porson was then dead. While he lived Parr would say, 'The first Greek scholar is Porson, and the third Elmsley; I won't say who the 'second is.'

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where learning and literature are in question, was held in undeniable respect by the first scholars in Europe. Parr never indeed stood higher in esteem than at the time of the publication of Gebir, to the admiration of whose ardent writer he presented a threefold claim. To the skilled Latin student he was the author of the Preface to Bellendenus; to the eager politician he was the friend of Fox and Grey; to the young adventurer in literature he had the charm of association with a greater Doctor Samuel, the chief of English men of letters, who had lately passed away. Sir,' said Johnson to Bennet Langton, in one of those conversations which Boswell's wonderful book had just then given to the world, 'Parr is a fair man. I do not know 'when I have had an occasion of such free controversy.' They had talked upon the liberty of the press; and Johnson, stamping unconsciously in the heat of the argument, had stopped suddenly on seeing Parr give a great stamp. 'Why did you stamp, Doc'tor Parr?' he asked. Sir,' replied Parr, because you stamped; ' and I was resolved not to give you the advantage even of a 'stamp in the argument.' This was good Johnsonian give-andtake, and would certainly not lower his namesake in Johnson's opinion; but it must be added that the trick of stamping remained too much with the lesser Samuel, who also practised afterwards pompous oracular ways, and dealt greatly in sonorous words, apparently derived from the same source. But, notwithstanding much pretentious and preposterous writing, what was most prominent in Parr's character was neither assumed nor commonplace. Johnson said it was a pity that such a man and such a scholar should be a Whig; and, considering that with the dispensers of church patronage in those days the most moderate forms of Whiggism were but other forms of Atheism, Deism, Socinianism, or any of the rest of the Isms that to a clergyman meant infamy and poverty, a more judicious choice of opinions might undoubtedly have been made. But in his way Parr was quite as sincere a man as Johnson, and opinions were as little a matter of mere choosing to the one as to the other.

Up to the time of the French Revolution Doctor Landor had himself been a Whig, as all Warwickshire had reason to know; for it was he who brought forward Sir Robert Lawley and Mr.

Ladbroke at the election which broke down Lord Warwick's predominance in the county. But when the split in the party came, and Burke carried over the deserters from Fox, Doctor Landor cast in his lot with them, and became also Pitt's vehement supporter. His son Walter, on the other hand, went as far as he could in the opposite extreme, and would doubtless have gone to the other side of England for the pleasure of greeting a friend of Mr. Fox so loud and uncompromising as Doctor Parr was at this time. As it was, he had to do little more than cross the threshold of his father's door.

At Hatton (Heath-town), a retired village on an eminence near what was then a wide tract of heath, two or three miles from Warwick on the Birmingham road, Parr had lived since 1783, when Lady Trafford presented him to its perpetual curacy. He was a poor man when he went there; but when more prosperous days came to him, he was too fond of the place to leave it, and there he died. At the small brick parsonage he built out a goodsized library, which he filled with books, of which the printed catalogue is still consulted with interest by scholars; and this became at last his dining-room also, where not seldom, at his frequent festivities, neither books nor friends were visible for the clouds of tobacco that rose and enveloped them from his morning, afternoon, and evening pipes. Sydney Smith says he had too much of his own way at these social parties, and would have been better for more knocking about among his equals; but the same sentence that laughs at him for his airs of self-importance celebrates not the less his copious and varied learning, the richness of his acquisitions, the vigour of his understanding, and, above all, the genuine goodness of his heart. Undue prominence was indeed given by two circumstances to the weak points in Parr's character: they were all upon the surface, and they were all of the quizzible kind. He had a quantity of foolish personal vanity; a lisp made more absurd his pompous way of speaking; and a corpulent figure set off disadvantageously his vagaries of dress. When he lost the mastership of Harrow, it was said that he went far completely to console himself by mounting that famous obumbrating wig, which, as Sydney said of it, swelled out behind into boundless convexity of frizz. But there is something

not difficult to forgive in absurdities of this kind, when accompanied by unworldliness of nature; and it is undoubtedly the case that Parr was at the bottom a very kindly and a very simple man. He could stand by those who had claims on his friendship, though all the rest of the world should fall from them; and it is the remark of a keen and unsparing judge of men, William Taylor of Norwich, in a comparison he makes between Parr and Mackintosh, that, whereas the latter inspired admiration rather than attachment, there was a lovingness about Parr and a susceptibility of affection that gave him an immense superiority. The time when Landor first knew Parr was that of Mackintosh's greatest intimacy with him; and of the characteristic traits of their intercourse still remembered there are few better than the remark made by Parr after a long argument. Jemmy, I cannot 'talk you down; but I can think you down, Jemmy.' It expresses at the same time one of those weaknesses by which it so often came to pass that Parr's company was inferior to himself, and such as he could talk down only too easily. But, even with Mackintosh, he had not seldom the upper hand. Formerly,' wrote Landor in one of his latest letters to Southey, 'I used to 'meet Mackintosh rather frequently. I never knew that he 'was so stored and laden as you give me to believe. He was certainly very inaccurate, not only in Greek but in Latin. Once at breakfast with Parr in Cary-street, where I was, and 'Hargrave and Jekyl, he used the word anabásis. Parr said, "Very right, Jemmy! very right! it is anabásis with you, but "anábasis with me and Walter Landor." I was very much 'shocked and grieved.'

What I have thus thought it right to connect with such brief mention of Landor's intercourse with Parr as will appear in these pages, receives also illustration, valuable because of personal knowledge, from one of Mr. Robert Landor's letters. He begins by speaking of a paper on Parr in Mr. De Quincey's collected works; and it is proper to remark that he writes with less sympathy for Parr's political opinions than for those of his critic. If Mr. De Quincey had been desirous to show us how far it might be possible to convey the most false and injurious ' notions of a man in language which no one could contradict,

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