cessful imitation brings with it. Next to the pleasure of creating comes the genuine pleasure of reproducing what other people have created. Reproduction or imitation is, in fact, a sort of creation of a secondary order. The definition of poetry given by the first of ancient philosophers is, that it is an art of imitating, by which he partly means, that it is the art of reproducing in language ideas which exist in nature or in the mind; giving, in fact, to airy nothings a local habitation and a name. Young poets, unfortunately, have no airy nothings of their own. They are obliged to borrow, not merely the principles of cooking, but the idea which is to be cooked. The process of re-cooking gives them a real artistic satisfaction, and if they were content to practice it in private, it would be a valuable part of their literary training.

room. Governesses are a very trying set. They to imitate is fostered by the real pleasure that suchave a way of goading the young soul into a frenzy, and making life seem very barren and unendurable. What with French verbs, and Pinnock's dates, and scales, and posture lessons, and the continual strain kept up on the mind by the necessity of walking straight and keeping the shoulders down, existence would be altogether intolerable, if it were not for the consolations of religion and of poetry. There will, at all events, be no governesses in heaven; pianofortes will give place to harps, and Pinnock and chronology will be extinguished when time itself shall be no more. The youthful poetess turns her attention, therefore, to poetical reflections on what will happen to her when she is an angel. She will have wings, and perhaps a lute; and when she turns over in her mind all the things that rhyme with wings and lutes, and remembers that when wings and lutes have been exhausted, lyres and pinions The mistake they make is in hoping that the rewill still remain behind, she feels that, come what chauffé which they have so sincerely enjoyed makmay in the shape of French verbs, she is rich in- ing, the world at large will care to taste. If the deed. And, accordingly, heaven plays to the young rechauffé were usually good of its kind, there would poetess the part that the moon and disappointed be less harm in their thinking so. But the parts of affection play to the young poet. It is obvious, from the style of great authors which they most commonthe nature of the subject, that she can continue pa-ly serve up are, as a rule, the most prominent, the tiently much longer at it. Some authoresses never most vulgar, and the most worthless. It is not unuse up the topic at all. They go on all through natural that it should be so. Clever rhymes, or intheir lives, belonging to what may, without irrever-genious twists, or curious and involved expressions, ence, be termed the lute-and-wing school of feminine poetry. The occupation is by no means in itself an unhealthy one for the young, and it is certainly much better for the head and heart to write about real angels than, like juvenile authors, to be scribbling about human angels in female dress. As compared with the latter pastime, the former is a noble and invigorating exercise; and youthful poetesses, who are in the lute-and-wing line, make up in high moral tone and in piety what they want in variety and strength.

The next stage in the history of versification is less natural, but a little more artistic. The young donkey-rider has learnt to appreciate the literary pleasure of metrical composition. He has taught himself to admire the feats in metre and in rhythm accomplished by all the great poets whom he observes caracoling over Parnassus, and he does not see why his Pegasus should not perform the same. Henceforward he trots out his animal for the sake of making it jump, and not simply with a view of occupying himself as a blighted being ought. The old anxiety to be a lover, gives place to the new desire of becoming a poet. He tries, one after the other, all the fences which others before him have taken, and contrives somehow or other to shamble over most of them with more or less satisfaction to himself. Minds begin by being receptive and impressionable long before they are productive or original, and as philosophy is said to commence in wonder, poetry-making starts in admiration. The first step is to reproduce the poetical echoes that have been picked up from reading the poetry of bigger

men.

A large number of great sentimentalists are remarkable for a characteristic mannerism of their own. They have a peculiar trick and swing and rhythm which reappears time after time in their various literary achievements. Their admirer soon seizes it, and believes that it is in this that the secret of their excellence resides. Poetry is the art of cooking and serving up pleasing thoughts in a tasteful and effective way, and the young cultivator of the Muses knows, or thinks he knows, how to cook his hare, long before he has caught it. His disposition

take the firmest hold on the attention of those who are only half trained to discriminate between literary pearls and literary husks. The beauties of a thoroughly artistic work, though patent to a skilled observer, are for a beginner far less patent than the mannerisms which deface it. He has a dim sense that the thing is beautiful, and he thinks that the cause of the beauty is the one thing which, in ninetynine cases out of a hundred, impairs and weakens it. Instead, therefore, of a good rechauffé, he presents his generation with a rechauffe that leaves out the subtle essence of the original, and reproduces only the garlic and the pepper in enormous quantities.

The errors of the authoress are not quite of the same description. She is too ambitious of creating startling effects. In ordinary cases, women do not go through the intellectual fermentation that is a necessary part of the literary training of men. They are simpler in their tastes and predilections; and their comparative ignorance of the tricks of composition preserves them from half the fantastic extravagances and mannerisms into which male poetasters tumble. They do not attempt as much as Phaeton or Icarus, and their failures are therefore less ludicrous and absurd. Having started in the lute-and-wing business early in life, they are quite content to continue in the humbler line of hymnological manufacture. Their imitative tendencies are amply satisfied when they have mastered some of the more difficult rhymes of Mrs. Hemans, or Mrs. Barrett Browning, and learnt that sweet evangel will rhyme to angel, that manna will go properly in harness with hosanna, that teraphim is a pleasing and ingenious match for seraphim, and that death's gloomy portals, may be made to pair off opposite to any number of immortals.

As poetry depends for its success on the poet's having something to say, and knowing how to say it when he has got it, the donkey-rider on Parnassus finds himself in a perpetual dilemma. In the first place, he starts at the wrong end of the rope. No amount of manoeuvring in verse will ever make up for the absence of all subject-matter, and the poet

aster is so anxious to manœuvre that, down to the self a consummate lyrical performer. His earliest end of his career, he goes on attitudinizing instead published poems are removed by a long interval of thinking. After long and laborious practice he from the more perfect melody which his later proteaches himself, like Blondin, to wheel his literary ductions often display. What began only in imperwheelbarrow on a tight rope over the heads of his fect promise has ended, in his case, with successful audience. But a literary wheelbarrow is not of performance. Taste and melodious diction come to much use, as long as it has got nothing in it except no man in his cradle. Horace himself, who boasts dewy showers and autumn flowers and moonlit that the Muses visited him in his childhood, is carebowers. Wheeling a whole cargo of them safely ful to disavow all claim to the facility of Lucilius; over from the beginning of a poem to the end is a and the genius which begins in facility, like all other poor occupation for a long life, and brings little cred-genius, will not get far upon its journey without it or emolument to the performer. Considering the much trouble and self-culture. As the poetasters of rush that there is upon versification in the present the age neither display thought nor cultivation, the age, it appears marvellous how very little substan- question naturally occurs, what on earth is the good tial work is done. The only parallel is the case of of them? The answer is, that, after all, they may modern sermons. In theory, parsons ought never as well be bad poets as bad at anything else. The to want matter for a sermon. The vicissitudes and deficiency of vigor, of intellectual substance, and of varieties of life are infinite, human character is full patient cultivation, which makes them worthless in of lights and shadows, and the topics with which re-literature, would make them equally unavailable in ligion might deal are as illimitable as the universe. other walks of life. They may as well write feeble In the presence of all this field for reflection and poems as fail in business, or remain to the end of observation, it seems almost a miracle that sermons their lives, weedy barristers or indifferent pictureshould be uniformly monotonous, dreary, and pover-painters. They do less harm to the world as they ty-stricken. The same kind of mental and moral are, and, though they are a nuisance and an annoyatrophy that attacks men who write sermons ap-ance, no one who cares for the welfare of his fellowpears also to prey upon men who take to poetrymaking. How rational human beings can go on for years at either occupation, without ever stumbling up against a really good thing to say, is purely unaccountable. The only explanation at all conceivable is, that they are so busy over the process of boiling their thoughts, that they end by forgetting that they ought to have thoughts, in the first instance, to put in the pot. It is possible that in the present day men think less than they used to do. They live more in a crowd, and are less alone. I WAS once spinning a bait for pike in a small but Even education is conducted in a hurry and a bus- well-stocked river in Northamptonshire, and I had tle, almost at railway speed. It is no longer a ne- just taken the bait-sh in my hand to adjust the cessary part of intellectual training, that a gentle-hooks, when a friend who considered me learned man should have meditated as well as studied, and in matters of sporting and natural history, said sudshould have lived, if one may use the expression, denly, "Pray, what are those little black things floatin the society of great authors, as well as have gal-ing on the water, shooting about in circles, the size loped through some of their most notorious works. of a split pea, there by the side of the stream?" The proper penalty to inflict on authors of bad ser- He meant the whirligig, Gyrinus natator. mons and bad verses would be, to transport them for a couple of years to solitary confinement in a country house, in the vicinity of a first-rate library. They would emerge from the salutary discipline wiser and less fluent men. We should have fewer new poems, and shorter sermons, but the world would not lose by the change a quarter of what the reformed and repentant criminals would gain.

creatures would wish to see the donkey-riders on Parnassus take to donkey-riding in the Church, or in commerce, or in Parliament. As they have been born into the world, they must stand somewhere, and they may as well take up their position in the monthly magazines and on the dusty shelves of publishers.

SUPERIOR INFORMATION.

For my own part, I had not the faintest notion at that time what the creatures were called. I have of course taken pains to find out before venturing to write this article. But I was preoccupied then; I was thinking of the bait, and whether it was any good trying that hole down by the little waterfall, where I had a shady sort of a run yesterday; and so I only answered, "O, those are little black things that float on the water."

had conveyed to him that they were no curiosities; but it did not strike me, till I heard his laugh, that the oracle had not spoken the expected words of wisdom, and that my superior information must have appeared to him nothing better than a sham.

It is not a little singular that the poetasters who have so few ideas do not really succeed in the "Thank you!" said he. It occurred to him, perrhythmical efforts to which they devote their ex-haps, that he had told me as much when he asked clusive attention. Great rhythmical poets seem to the question. And yet, in my abstraction, I no be dying out of the land. There are probably none doubt fancied that I had fully satisfied him. The in existence, except Mr. Tennyson and Mr. Brown-"little black things" are common enough, and I ing. The truth is, that the same want of intellectual tension which prevents the donkey-rider on Parnassus from being instructive or edifying also prevents him from being thoroughly successful in the musical and mechanical part of his work. He can make rhymes, if he cannot make ideas; but the rhymes he makes are, in general, rhymes and nothing more. Very few poets are born complete masters of rhythm. There is such a thing as a natural ear for it, as there is such a thing as a natural genius for music; but both require an equal amount of laborious cultivation. It is by slow degrees, and People all over the world have certainly a tenprobably with much care, and after a series of lit-dency to endow somebody else with the credit for erary infanticides, that Mr. Tennyson has made him- possessing superior information. Very clever people

This, indeed, is a very simple occurrence, but I have caught myself telling it often as a good tale, as the sort of thing a man mentions at his own expense, with a fair conviction that he can afford to do so, as a funny exception to his general accuracy and information.

Аз

are constantly committing themselves by the perfect | dinner was to be dainty and the wines "curious,"
reliance they place upon the opinion or advice of
some contemptible quack. A man who has given
his whole heart, and most of his life, to law, theology,
or the classics, will often go for information on a
matter of horseflesh or farming to some new pre-
tender who happens to have at command a few
special and technical phrases. A man or a child
may pass for an adept without much apprentice-
ship. Let him assert himself pretty loudly, and
he is sure of listeners. I once made the acquaint-matter.
ance of a very gaudy barn-door cock; he was in
the habit of strutting and crowing his challenges
all day; but I regret to add that, when at last
they were answered, when a neighboring fowl of
small stature burst upon his dunghill, he fled in
the most disreputable manner, before the very faces
of his hens. He had not a ha'porth of the pluck
he bragged of. The adept sometimes is sterling
enough, no doubt, but frequently he is some little
fool to whom accident has given a character for
proficiency. One would think that this latter per-
sonage could only retain his ascendency amongst
the very ignorant or the very loving; i. e. with the
unsophisticated, or in the bosom of his family.
These of course, one might imagine, would be con-
tent with a superstition, and fail to perceive the
fallibility of their god. But the strange thing is,
that wise men are so often contented to seek their
information from the lips of ignorance.

the original business committee appointed yet an-
other committee amongst themselves, which should
have power to choose two able and experienced
men given to a familiarity with French dishes, but,
above and beyond all, connoisseurs in wine.
far as the mere dinner went, I understand that they
got on tolerably well,-possibly their only business
here consisted in approving the elaborate carte sent
them by the cook; but the wine was a more solemn
A great responsibility rested on them.
With champagne, of course, they were safe, as the
brand was a sufficient guide. Neither did they at
all commit themselves in the matter of claret; La-
fitte and a heavy price carried them through. But
with port wine they found some difficulty, and their
opinions were divided. It grew dark as they ar-
gued and tasted, and lights were brought. They
were left alone in the room at last with port and
sherry; and when at length the time came for these
superiorly-informed beings, these, the elect of the
committee, to produce the port which they had
chosen out of so many samples, lo and behold! it
was brown sherry.

Now, I wonder if I may say, without disrespect to the clergy, that it is very seldom I obtain from the pulpit the information which I desire. That information ought to be superior, because it commonly comes from educated gentlemen, and always from those who are supposed to have made its subWhat I mean to say is this, that not only is a ject their special study. Sometimes it is superior; man who has the credit for being an adept looked it is better than one's own, I mean; it is as good upon from all quarters with a wonderful respect, as the pages of a book. It is a common and a hatebut that also it does not seem to be a particularly ful fault, it is a silly and a disreputable fashion, difficult matter to obtain that credit. In the in- which reviles the clergy of these kingdoms. With stance which I have given of the Gyrinus natator, the exception perhaps of the bar, there is no proI humbly consider that I arrogated nothing to my-fession whose members are so well informed as those self: the oracle did not happen to be up in that of the clerical. And yet how frequently is one subject; and, besides, the oracle was busy and pre- ashamed of the sermon, and indirectly of the clergyoccupied. There would have been nothing ludi- man who preaches it! Very often his superior crous in the response but for the expectation of its information is taken wholesale and word for word infallibility. But how I enjoy seeing a thorough- from somebody else's printed sermon; occasionally paced pretender floored! And, after mature con- he only steals the skeleton and the thoughts; somesideration, I think that a mere pretender to be a times he borrows a friend's lucubrations, and, in that judge in wine is the finest and the fairest game of way, very possibly gives us the benefit of thoughts all. Observe with what expressive silence he seeks twice stolen. But I am very seriously afraid that to convince you of his superior information! He the most common practice is to contrive by some scorns to bluster about his knowledge. He covers means to do without any thoughts at all. This is the glass with both his hands, and sniffs the aroma a pity and distressing. It is pretentious and unwhen the wine is supposed to be warm; he holds fair, and an abuse of confidence, for a man to dress the stem lightly between his finger and thumb, himself up in a silk gown and walk solemnly along sloping the glass a little, and looks intently upon an aisle, and slowly up some steps, conducted by what he conceives to be an oily richness running another man with a red collar and a blue stick with down the sides of the glass. Then, perhaps, he gilding at the top, when he has got nothing to say. pronounces on the vintage or the bin, as the case The public have been saying their prayers, and are may be. He tells you that it is very fine wine quite contented to let well alone; they are ready indeed; that it ought to be drunk, however, as to leave the church with reverential thoughts and there is a good deal of it, he believes, and it would good desires; they are not exorbitant in their debe a sin to let it get passé. This, and all the rest mands, and really don't want to trouble anybody of it, which we know so well by heart, he says and for anything more. But when the responsible pardoes. Alas for his superior information! for you, ties offer to begin again, when they tacitly assure, suspecting that he was an impostor, gave him a us that there is yet another matter worth staying bottle out of the cask of something rather tawny. for, and when this other matter is ushered in with the pomp and promise mentioned above, it does seem reasonable that some effort should be made to rise above rigmarole, and to present something of a higher character than the most vapid platitudes. And yet there is in the depths a deeper still. However annoying it may be to have a string of unmeaning sentences forced upon you, it is much more annoying, and I think irritating, to have some ridiculous truism recommended to your understand

A little circumstance once occurred within my own knowledge, which is, perhaps, worth setting down here. Some gentlemen, who were either a committee, or a board, or a meeting, at any rate, who had met together very many times on business, determined, as such gentlemen do determine, to solace their anxieties with a dinner. This dinner was to be given at some first-rate hotel either in Manchester or Liverpool, I believe. Well, as the

May 5, 1866.]

faces when they least desire it; if he will not profess a profound acquaintance with matters of which he is entirely ignorant, we shall all jog on very comfortably, either in our learning or our ignorance; for, whatever else we may lack or possess, there will at least be the happy presence of that invaluable companion, good-humor.

PAST CELEBRITIES.

ing with as much circumstance and show as if it | were a recent discovery in polemics, or an important message from Heaven. Worst of all is that explanation which seeks to recommend itself by its condescension, which is supposed to come from a great mind to a very narrow one, which charitably amplifies matters in order to make them easy. Thus, I once heard with my own ears a piece of superior information which made them tingle, and surely nothing less than the reticence of good manners could have saved the congregation from committing themselves in shouts of laughter. suppose that Mr. Cyrus Redding had exhausted "As it were a himself in his "Fifty Years' Recollections, Literary young lion lurking in secret," said the preacher; and Personal," is an error only to be dispelled by that is, my brethren," he kindly continued, "a the perusal of these two new volumes of reminlion in the bloom of youth." O ye gods! a rosy-iscences. Mr. Redding's experiences extend, indeed, cheeked lion, a blushing lion! And yet he never saw the incongruity, but thought in his heart that he had made matters clear and comfortable to our comprehensions.

Perhaps, as a matter of fact, every one is better informed than his fellow upon some point, and every one, therefore, who can speak or write, is capable of conveying information. But let us take care that the man to whom we go is a sterling man, a genuine professor of the subject on which we consult him. No one surely who wished to learn how to milk a cow, would apply to the school-girl who was passing through a course of instruction, but to the milkmaid herself. Neither would a reasonable man who desired to become acquainted with top-dressing and turnips, inquire of any other than an experienced farmer. But from these, undoubtedly, a great deal might be learned. The relative value of a knowledge of the classics, and a knowledge of milking or of agriculture, has little to do with the fact, that farmer and classic may have

each a very considerable amount of knowledge which the other does not possess. The presence of superior information on one side is as clear as its presence on the other; and no one, however learned, who will condescend to ask questions, can go through the world without confessing that he becomes a wiser man almost every day of his life.

To

over so considerable a space of time, and go so far through genius, attainments, or public services, who back, as to embrace many worthy of remembrance have now run their career and passed away, and who yet were not even born at the period when these reminiscences begin.

This is the case with the late Lord Canning, our perennial author having first met his father, George Charles John was born. Yet does he remember the Canning, at Saltram, in 1812, the same year that appearance of the before-mentioned great statesman so distinctly as to give a more homely, and yet a tofore met with. "I see his compact figure now, more vivid, description of him than we have herehis open countenance, and bald head, and as clearly, too, as at that time. When dressed for dinner, a point always scrupulously regarded in those with his intellectual cast of countenance, could not days, Mr. Canning looked remarkably well, and fail to impress the mind of a stranger that he was a mored expression animated his features; his foreman of no ordinary stamp. A mild and good-huhead was lofty, his eyes expressive of kindliness and intellectual vigor. White silk stockings, shoes and buckles, snuff-colored or brown dress-breeches with knee buckles, a white waistcoat, and a blue coat with gilt buttons, were then generally worn at the

dinner-table."

I think we deceive ourselves wretchedly about The personality is as effective as canvas, but when the amount and value of our information. General we come to the reflection of mind, that of the obknowledge is exceedingly superficial with the mass of "educated people," though they may be, perhaps, served, for the only reminiscence recorded upon this server mingles itself amusingly with that of the obthe last to think so. We take our acquirements too individual occasion was, that the first propounder of much for granted. Most of us, perhaps, know how the Monroe doctrine was uncommonly tickled at far Mercury is from the sun; that the peregrine fal- Mr. Redding's quoting from Espriella's letters a sugcon changes the color and markings of her plumage gestion to cure sickness from eating hare by giving after the first moult, and that flint is one of the prim-greyhound broth. Mr. Canning being a man of literary as well as of oratorical and political powers, this, with his pure unadulterated classical English, gave him happiest hits was on the occasion of Copley (Lord One of his great advantages in debate. Lyndhurst) using the arguments of Philpott's (Bishan ornament when they cannot afford a golden one; and we are all ready enough to assert ourselves in op of Exeter) against emancipation, which led Canmatters of information; we don't let the world ratening to remark that he (Copley) had stolen all the called to his mind the old song, arguments he had just used from a source that re

itive earths. But should we be able to endure one of the great tests of a thorough soundness; to answer, off-hand, the searching, though simple questions of a child in the easy rudiments of astronomy; ornithology, or geology? However, men will gild

"Dear Tom, the brown jug that now foams with mild ale Was once Toby Philpot's."

us at too low an estimate. The best of us tag on a bit of tinsel sometimes. We all do it,- from the man who "crams" his conversation, to him who is only silent in order that he may appear to know. And really, after all, there is nothing very alarming Mr. Cyrus Redding was a zealous advocate of in all this. There is often much less hypocrisy in it, Catholic emancipation, and suffered greatly in the than in the conventional" Good morning"; and if cause; it is not surprising, then, that Canning should a man will only refrain from irritating his fellow-be his great political hero, and he tells us that, had creatures, by assuming their boundless ignorance in he survived, "he would have done something for the explanation he offers them on matters which are the interests of literature, which might have prepatent to mankind; if he will avoid, as far as possible, flourishing his superior information in their

* Past Celebrities whom I have Known. By CYRUS REDDING.

served it from becoming little more than a thing of the trader's speculation, and the corruptor of the popular taste through pampering the least informed among the multitude.

hatred," says Redding, "is a proverb," - he had a
great distaste for the Lakers," as Southey, Words-
worth, and Coleridge were then styled, and he looked
upon them as apostates to the generous principles of
their youth.
up
of rem-

The notice of Hazlitt is chiefly made

The reminiscences of J. W. M. Turner, who is designated as" the first of English artists," but who was as remarkable for his curt manners, shrewd re-iniscences of his connection with the New Monthly, marks, and personal independence, or, as our au- and there is an amusing anecdote of Campbell's inthor has it, "freedom from all the 'booing' so com- sisting upon a report by Hazlitt of a great fight mon in the presence of station or wealth for profit between the Game Chicken and the Gas-light Man or patronage sake," as for his undoubted genius, being inserted, in opposition to Mr. Redding's wishes, refer mainly to excursions in that "region of fine because, he said, it was "a picture of the elegant' landscape," the mouth and estuary of the Tamar; manners of your country," i. e. Mr. Redding's counthe rest is a disquisition upon Turner's talents and try. "It is a picture of manners," said the poet,peculiarities, full of noble sympathies and aspira-"your manners. It is a history painting; let us intions, but in which all may not agree in finding it a matter to praise that his pictures are" divested of that hard, clear outline" shown by Claude, or that in them "we lose sight of those detestable Gothic edifices reared during the Middle Ages, and in their style studied, for the purpose of holding the human

mind in darkness."

sert it." Hazlitt had once said that a free admission to the theatre was the "true pathos and sublime of human life," but in his last published words he remarked, "That if the stage shows us the masks of men, and the pageant of the world, books let us into their souls, and lay open for us the secrets of our own. They are the first and last, the most homefelt, the most heartfelt of all our enjoyments." Hazlitt's was undoubtedly an observing, thoughtful intellect, but corrupted in the purposes to which it was applied by the worst forms of Cockneyism.

One anecdote of Turner is peculiarly illustrative of his art. Being near Saltash, the sun just setting, and the shadows becoming dark and deep, an artist in company remarked, that the ports in the sides of the vessels in ordinary could not be discriminated; he was looking, at the time, at a seventy-four gun" lion's den," as it was called, wig and pipe included, ship, which lay in the shadow under Saltash. The ship seemed one dark mass.

"I told you that would be the effect," said Turner. Now, as you observe, it is all shade."

66

Mr. Cyrus Redding informs us that when he first met Hazlitt, he scarcely knew what to make of him. It was not till he had become acquainted with the inner man, by his writings, that he appreciated his talents. This is probably often the case when the individual has no accidents of birth, fortune, powers of conversation, or advantages of person or manners with which to attract attention. Hazlitt was like De Quincey, whom he resembled in the absence of any of these worldly recommendations, a deep thinker, and a powerful observer, not a talker. Christopher North used to say, he did the talking at table, he left it to the opium-eater to tell him afterwards who and what the company were. So with Hazlitt; Talfourd, Lamb, Leigh Hunt, and many of his contemporaries, outshone him in conversational powers, but he left them far behind him in his powers as a critic. Hazlitt grappled with the profoundest treatises on abstract subjects. If," Mr. Redding says, "the periodical publications of the present hour were to deal in them, they would fail from lack of interest, through the want of popular comprehension." We do not agree with this. Abstract philosophy and scientific subjects are more generally treated of in the present day than of yore, but the art of popularizing, such as Laplace, Arago, Herschel, Lyell, Faraday, and a host of others have done in our times, was then unknown. As a stern and uncompromising Dissenter, "Ecclesiastical

66

Dr. Parr at Hatton, in his summer-house, or

is a pleasant picture. "The fame of Parr, his pon-
derous wig and bushy eyebrows, his character," says
Mr. Redding, " in fact his great learning, prevented
me from conversing freely with him, until I found
I had conjured up an imaginary phantom, a fear
for which there was not the slightest ground." Dr.
Parr was, indeed, a man of simple and homely hab
its, and of ordinarily mild language. At church, he
conducted the service with as much simplicity as if
he were speaking in his drawing-room.
His parish-
ioners, high or low, he regarded equally as his care,
he made no distinction. Mr. Redding says, he
entered Hatton church one Sunday morning with
a lady. Parr stopped reading the lesson, said to
his favorite servant, Sam (who he complained was a
hot Tory, and would sometimes dispute against his
master's Whiggery, though an excellent servant),
"Show that lady and gentleman into my pew." He
used to have a maypole set up in the little village,
at the inn of which all the male guests at his little
fete dined. The ladies dined with himself and Mrs.
Parr in the library. He would at times take his
pipe and go into the kitchen before he went to bed,
making any clerical friend he had at his house go
with him. He would there sit by the fire, smoke and
talk of the men of his cloth who had passed away,
and how the old-fashioned clergy lived in the coun-
try in their scanty dwellings.

This learned, venerable, and truth-loving old man had some notions which Mr. Redding sets down as unworthy a man ranking so high above the silly spiritualists of the present day. He did not like to sit down with an odd number at table. He was once pacified on the matter when some one observed that a lady present was in the family-way. The "some one was not, at all events, a very delicateminded person. A scholar and a gentleman, " Jack Bartlam," as Parr called him, visited Hatton on particular days of the week, and became like one of the Doctor's family. He died suddenly in a bookseller's shop in Harley Street, London. Ever afterwards, up to the time of his own death, Parr had a plate laid at table for Mr. Bartlam upon the days of the week he used to dine. The Doctor might sometimes be