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a

but only a slight difference threatening controversy. "It was from Doctor Parr's table," Mr. Robert Landor replied to my further 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, Doctor 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 decide 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 Oxford 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 incident 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.'

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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."

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

III. DOCTOR PARR.

In the first article written by Sydney Smith in the Edinburgh H view, he reproachfully called attention to the fact that by far t most learned man of his day* was languishing on a little palt curacy in Warwickshire. This was Doctor Parr, whose name at t beginning of the century, little as it is now remembered where lear ing and literature are in question, was held in undeniable respect the first scholars in Europe. Parr never indeed stood higher in este than at the time of the publication of Gebir, to the admiration whose ardent writer he presented a threefold claim. To the skill Latin student he was the author of the Preface to Bellendenus ; the eager politician he was the friend of Fox and Grey; to the your adventurer in literature he had the charm of association with a great Doctor Samuel, the chief of English men of letters, who had late passed away. "Sir," said Johnson to Bennet Langton, in one those conversations which Boswell's wonderful book had just th given to the world, "Parr is a fair man. I do not know when I ha had an occasion of such free controversy." They had talked up the liberty of the press; and Johnson, stamping unconsciously in t heat of the argument, had stopped suddenly on seeing Parr give great stamp. "Why did you stamp, Doctor Parr?" he aske Sir," replied Parr, "because you stamped; and I was resolved to give you the advantage even of a stamp in the argument." T was good Johnsonian give-and-take, and would certainly not lower 1 namesake in Johnson's opinion; but it must be added that the tri of stamping remained too much with the lesser Samuel, who also pr tised afterwards pompous oracular ways, and dealt greatly in sonoro words, apparently derived from the same source. But, notwithsta ing much pretentious and preposterous writing, what was most pro nent in Parr's character was neither assumed nor commonpla Johnson said it was a pity that such a man and such a scholar sho be a Whig; and, considering that with the dispensers of chur patronage in those days the most moderate forms of Whiggism w but other forms of Atheism, Deism, Socinianism, or any of the r of the isms that to a clergyman meant infamy and poverty, a m judicious choice of opinions might undoubtedly have been ma But in his way Parr was quite as sincere a man as Johnson, a opinions were as little a matter of mere choosing to the one as to t other.

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

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 good-sized 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 vigor 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

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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; indeed, to such a degree, that I felt indisposed to take any part in the conversation afterwards; only saying (which was not quite true) that I did not know it until then: which obtained me a punch of the elbow under the rib, and the interjection of lying dog !"

Some of the points I have thus thought it fair to prefix to such mention of Landor's intercourse with Parr as will appear in these pages from time to time, receive also illustration, valuable because of personal knowledge, from one of Mr. Robert Landor's letters. He begins by speaking of a recent paper on Parr by Mr. De Quincey, published in the sixth volume of his collected works; and it is proper to remark that he writes with less sympathy for Parr's politi cal 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, which said nothing but the truth, he could hardly have succeeded better. What he has written is very true and very false; but there are some old people, like myself, who may wish that the mixture had been less skilfully malicious, and a great deal more honest. There was some resemblance between the doctor and my

* Among Landor's papers I found the following:

"From the old brown portfolio. Presented to Parr as an Epitaph, December 21, 1799. "Here lies our honest friend Sam Parr:

† August, 1832.

A better man than most men are.

So learned, he could well dispense
Sometimes with merely common sense:
So voluble, so eloquent,

You little heeded what he meant:

So generous, he could spare a word
To throw at Warburton or Hurd:

So loving, every village maid
Sought his caresses, though afraid."

brother. Never could there be a vainer man than, the one, or a prouder man than the other: the comic part of the same selfish passion, and the tragic. Both demanded admiration,― the Doctor of his wig, his cassock, the silk frogs on his new coat; Walter of his very questionable jests recommended by a loud laugh. Both were very delightful when in good humor, and dangerously offensive when displeased. Mr. De Quincey represents the Doctor as talking gross nonsense; and so he often did. But then, at other times, his conversation was the most eloquent and abundant in charining imagery that it has ever been my fortune to hear.* Both resented the slightest appearance of disrespect: but Parr was much the most placable and willing to be reconciled. Mr. De Quincey should have recorded his warm-hearted sincerity in friendship, which hardly failed when friendship had become not only dangerous but discreditable. Perhaps you would have thought that my brother excelled in genius, imagination, power, and variety, when at his best, as much as Parr exceeded him in all kinds of acquired knowledge. There was the same resemblance in the warmth of their love and hatred ; but Parr's love lasted the longest, and so did Walter's hatred. It would be impossible to determine which of them hated one particular connection the most; nor whether either had ever hated any one else so much. Beside the great difference in the age of these competitors (Walter was twenty-three at the publication of Gebir, and Parr fifty-one), and, at that time, of reputation, I think that they were kept from quarrels by mutual respect, by something like awe of each other's temper, and a knowledge that, if war began at all, it must be to the knife. "It would be great impertinence in me," Mr. Landor adds, "if any opinions were offered here on the Doctor's literary pretensions. But surely the pretensions of a writer and reasoner familiar, during many years, with Charles Fox, James Mackintosh, Bobus Smith, Richard Sharp, Samuel Rogers, and other distinguished people, could hardly have been so contemptible as it is now the fashion to suppose. I say this, though he once treated me more offensively than any one else ever did."

The correspondence of Parr and Landor, while the latter was still at Oxford, has been mentioned in a preceding page; † and such of Parr's later letters as I possess, with one or two of Landor's, though of not much moment in themselves and but a fragment of what passed between them, will show well enough, as I quote them from time to time in my memoir, the character of their intercourse. Gebir, as soon as published, found its way to Hatton, with a letter in which the writer told Parr that, however proud and presumptuous he might have shown himself in the effort he had made, he rather thought that during the time the Doctor was reading and examining it he should himself be undergoing much the same sensation as the unfortunate *This is entirely borne out by the account of William Taylor, of Norwich. † Ante, p. 25.