was boldly censured in newspapers and pamphlets, supposed to be writ ten by persons in high credit and confidence with the ministry, O'Beirne came forward in defence of his friend, and published a pamphlet in vindication of his conduct, that had an extensive circulation, and was ex tolled by the adherents of the general and admiral. In thus vindicating the character of his noble friend he was necessarily led to consider the conduct of the admiralty as far as it was connected with his subject, and, in this part of the pamphlet, he placed their inattention to the information they had received of the designs of the court of France, of their armaments and their destination, in a strong light, and forcibly exposed their ignorance and incapacity in the disposition of the forces which they were at length driven to send to Lord Howe's relief.

About this time he was presented by Lord Thurlow to the vicarage of West Deeping, in Lincolnshire, on the application of Lord Howe. This was the only instance of his lordship's patronage which he ever had to acknowledge.

No sooner had Lord Fitzwilliam made Mr O'Beirne known to his

friends than he zealously engaged in their service. His first essay was in The Englishman,' a periodical paper that united all the talents of the party; and if we are not misinformed, the last three numbers are to be ascribed to him. He next engaged in The Country Gentleman,' the signature under which he wrote a series of letters that appeared regularly in a paper then printed by Almon. In this work, according to Almon's information in a late publication, in which he has inserted four of these numbers, he received no other assistance than one letter from the elegant pen of Mr Burke, jun. Shortly after appeared the substance of a charge of mismanagement against the first lord of the admiralty, on the motion of Mr Fox in the house of commons. This was a kind of brief drawn up under the direction of Lord Keppel, from which Mr Fox produced that charge which first shook Lord North's administration, leaving him in a majority of only 16. His other political productions were a defence of Lord Keppel, in a pamphlet entitled 'Considerations on Naval Courts-martial,' Letters to Commodore Johnston,' under the signature of Blake, on his engagement with Suffrein, in Port Praya Road; a short History of the late Parliament;' 'Considerations on the late Disturbances, by a consistent Whig;' 'The Source of the Evil,' in four letters, written on the dissolution of the duke of Portland's administration; an Answer to the Treasury Famphlet on the Irish Propositions,' to which Mr Chalmers wrote a reply, as if written by Mr Burke; and A Letter to a Friend in Ireland on the Fourth Proposition.' He was member of the club from which issued the Rolliad, Probationary Odes,' &c. &c.; but we do not believe. that he contributed any part towards these celebrated compositions, except a few epigrams, and the probationary ode ascribed to Dr Wharton.

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In March, 1782, when the Rockingham party came into power, O'Beirne accompanied the duke of Portland, his avowed patron, then appointed lord-lieutenant of Ireland, to that country as his private secretary. He was also nominated one of his chaplains. His grace had not, from the short duration of his government, any opportunity of providing, as he wished, for his clerical friend; but being now perfectly convinced, from his experience in Irish affairs, of the doctor's talents for public business, he employed his pen, and had recourse to his ad

vice on almost every important occasion. He was initiated in all the mysteries of opposition, and assisted at several secret conferences held by its leaders.

When the duke of Portland was raised to the important office of first lord of the treasury, in April, 1783, he appointed O'Beirne his private secretary. On the day previous to the nomination of Pitt as first lord of the treasury, he was put into possession of two livings in Northumberland and Cumberland, valued at nearly £700 a-year, which were in the gift of government. In the winter of 1785 his health was so materially injured, that, after having taken the waters of Bath for some time to no purpose, he was recommended by his physicians to try the air of the continent; and he spent the spring and summer of the following year at the duke of Richmond's seat, at Aubigne, in Berry. In this excursion he was accompanied by his lady. She was the only surviving child of Colonel Francis Stuart, brother to the earl of Moray, lineally descended from the duke of Albany, brother to Robert III. of Scotland, and by the marriage of his ancestor with the only child of the regent Moray, still more nearly allied to the royal line of Stuart. By this lady he had a son and two daughters. His visit to the continent did not answer his expectations, and he was advised to repeat the trial, which, in his earlier life, had proved so successful. He therefore proceeded, on his return from France, with his family to his mother's in Ireland, where he once again experienced the efficiency of his native air, and being encouraged by the recovery of his health to accept the offer which, in compliment to the duke of Portland, was made him of the rich benefices of Temple-Michael and Mohill by the then archbishop of Tuam, he resigned his living in Northumberland, and settled in Ireland for life.

In this situation of a minister of the parish in which he was born, he remained till Lord Fitzwilliam undertook the lord-lieutenancy of Ireland, when his lordship called him to Dublin, appointed him his private secretary and first chaplain, and in a few weeks promoted him to the see of Ossory, from whence, in Lord Cornwallis's administration, he was translated to the see of Meath, and made a privy-counsellor in Ireland.

Bishop O'Beirne was among the most active and zealous of those who supported the measures and promoted the principles of the Fitzwilliam administration. He was particularly so in furtherance of what seemed to be the primary object of the viceroy,-the emancipation, as it was called, of the Catholics. He not only approved that measure, but took up his pen in defence of it, and pleaded the cause of the Catholics with his accustomed energy and pathos. When Lord Fitzwilliam was removed from office, and the character and measures of his administration came to be canvassed in rather a severe and acrimonious spirit in the Irish house of peers, Bishop O'Beirne stood forward with honest warmth and distinguished ability in defence of his absent and injured patron. His speech in the house of lords on that occasion, was reckoned among the best which have been delivered in the assembly.

He died on the 15th of February, 1823. As a diocesan, he was much beloved by his clergy; many of whom were in the habit of travelling considerable distances to attend his lectures on topics of religious controversy. He made a solemn declaration, that, in the ecclesiastical

promotions which were at his disposal, he should be influenced by the merits of the candidates only.

In 1799 his lordship collected and published, in one volume octavo, the different sermons which he had preached on public occasions, with three charges and a circular address to the clergy of his diocese. In 1801 the bishop preached the anniversary sermon at St Paul's cathedral for the charity schools, in which he took occasion to animadvert, in severe terms, upon the supposed neglect of religious instruction in our public seminaries. For this he was rather roughly handled by that profound scholar and able schoolmaster, Dr Vincent, in a letter, which made considerable noise, but which the bishop did not answer.

Samuel Parr, LL.D.

BORN A. D. 1747.-DIED A. D. 1825.

DR PARR was born at Harrow-on-the-Hill, January 15th, (O. S.) 1747. His father was Samuel Parr, the third and youngest son of the Rev. Mr Parr, vicar of Hinckley and Stoke, Leicestershire, and of Dowthy Brokesby, a daughter of the Rev. Francis Brokesby, rector of Rowley, Yorkshire. Robert Parr, the doctor's great-uncle, who lived at Hinckley, but had preferment in Warwickshire, was an excellent Greek scholar, and a most orthodox divine. The same praise is due to the doctor's uncle, Mr Robert Parr.

The doctor's father succeeded Leonard Mignart as surgeon and apothecary at Harrow, and died there, 23d of January, 1766.

From his infancy, Dr Parr gave manifest indications of a thirst for knowledge and of ability to acquire it. At Easter, 1752, he was admitted on the foundation of the free school at Harrow. He passed through the classes with great approbation from his teachers, and became the head-boy, January, 1761, when he had not completed his fourteenth year. He always spoke with filial regard and thankfulness of the kind treatment he received from the Rev. Dr Thackeray, who resigned the mastership in 1760, and died in the autumn of that year. While Parr was a boy, he formed a close and lasting friendship with his school-fellows, the celebrated Sir William Jones, and the learned Dr Bennet, afterwards bishop of Cloyne. The literary curiosity of the three boys extended far beyond the regular business of the school, and influenced their harmless, and even useful amusements. They assumed the office of sovereigns; they took ancient names; and, with little regard to chronology or geography, they selected their dominions from the neighbouring fields. Thus Jones was called Euryalus, king of Arcadia; Bennet, Nisus, king of Argos; Parr, Leander, prince of Abydos and Sestos. In those fields which they visited, while other boys were intent upon different amusements, they were often engaged in intellectual competition. They acquired the art of logic, and disputed in syllogism, sometimes upon subjects of natural history, and sometimes upon metaphysical questions, which were suggested to them by Dacier's Translation of Plato's Dialogues. They displayed their oratory, such as it was, in lively debates, upon the interests of their ideal kingdoms, and triumphant descriptions of their success in trials of skill and strength

with some of their brave and sturdy school-fellows. Parr and Jones wrote tragedies upon some of the stories, by which they had been interested in the course of their reading. They had a custom of attempting to imitate any English writer, by whose excellencies of style they had been powerfully impressed; and the doctor has been known to speak with rapture of his endeavours to rival Sir William Jones in the short and abrupt sentences of Phalaris's Epistles, and Bennet in the gaudy and captivating diction of Harvey's Meditations. To these early and singular operations of their understandings may, in a great degree, be ascribed the eminence which they afterwards reached in the republic of letters. But for the regularity and the rapidity of their progress in classical learning, they were yet more indebted to the instruction of Dr Robert Sumner, who in 1760 became the successor of Dr Thackeray, and whose character is beautifully described by Sir William Jones, in his preface to the Commentaries upon Asiatic Poetry.' It was the happier lot of Jones and Bennet to remain for several years under the care of Dr Sumner. Parr enjoyed this advantage only from the summer 1760 to the spring of 1761, when he was removed from school, and employed in the business of his father. But the progress which he made in the writings of antiquity, and the habits which he had formed for the cultivation of his mind, enabled him to continue his studies with unwearied industry, and increasing effect. In the midst of the duties imposed on him by his father, he read the best authors in Greek and Latin. He also applied himself most earnestly to those philological inquiries, which afterwards occupied so large a portion of his time.

Observing the ardour of his son's spirit, and the vigour of his understanding, his father, after instructing him in the elementary parts of medicine, sometimes proposed to place him in the shop of Mr Trusdale, in London, where his experience would be more extensive; and sometimes permitted the young man to indulge the expectation of prosecuting his studies upon a more enlarged scale in one of the Scotch universities. But the doctor was never reconciled to any class of the medical profession, and obtained leave from his father to enter at Emanuel college, Cambridge, in 1765. He began his academical residence in the autumn of that year, and had the good fortune to be placed under the tuition of the Rev. Mr Hobard, and the Rev. Mr Farmer, for both of whom, as men of letters and men of virtue, he entertained the most profound respect. During his continuance at Cambridge, his spirits were lively, and his temper was social; but his companions were few, and his pleasures innocent. His application was incessant; and his obedience to the discipline of the college was most exemplary. The force of his mind was chiefly directed to classical and philological reading; yet he, at the same time, had formed the most serious determination to prepare himself for his degree; and he secretly aspired to a high class in those academical honours which are bestowed upon great proficiency in mathematical knowledge. But these prospects, which delighted his ambition and animated his diligence, were of short duration. The fortune bequeathed to him by his father was very scanty; the college in which he was placed afforded him no chance of a fellowship. His abilities and his worth had recommended him to the notice of Dr Sumner; at whose pressing solicitation he, in January, 1767, accepted

the office of first assistant in Harrow school. In Christmas, 1769, he was ordained to the curacies of Wilsdon and Kingsbury, Middlesex, which he resigned in the following year. When with the highest credit

to himself, and the greatest satisfaction to his employers, Parr had for nearly five years sustained the office of an assistant, Dr Sumner, in the autumn of 1771, was carried off by apoplexy. Parr was now a candidate for the head-mastership, but his youth was pleaded by the governors as a reason for rejecting his pretensions. The boys, however, whom he had instructed with so much activity, and governed with so much wisdom, were anxious for his success; and when the election fell upon the learned Mr Benjamin Heath, the young gentlemen endeavoured to avenge the cause of their favourite master, by overt acts of violence and rebellion. Parr instantly resigned his assistantship, and opened a school at Stanmore, on the 14th of October, 1771; he carried with him about forty boys from Harrow.

In November, 1771, Mr Parr married Miss Jane Marsingale, a lady maternally descended from the ancient family of the Manlevelers, in Yorkshire, and much admired for the soundness of her judgment, and the keenness of her penetration. While the doctor continued at Stanmore, the number of his scholars never exceeded sixty, and the profits of his severe labours were exhausted by the heavy debts which he was compelled to contract in the purchase of a house and furniture, and in making proper accommodation for the reception of his scholars.

Oppressed by the prevalence of the old and extensive interests which supported the neighbouring school at Harrow, and desirous to procure some settled situation, Parr, in 1776, accepted the mastership of Colchester school, which had become vacant by the death of the Rev. Mr Smythies. Being ordained priest in the succeeding year, he was presented to the cures of Trinity and Hythe, in Colchester, where he generally preached extempore. He went to Colchester in the spring of 1777. He repaired the school-house; took a neighbouring house for the reception of scholars; and though the success of his endeavours to establish a flourishing seminary was very inconsiderable, he always looked back with pleasure to that period of his life in which he had an opportunity of cultivating the friendship of the Rev. Thomas Twining, and the Rev. Dr Nathaniel Forster. The society of Mr Twining was exquisitely agreeable to the doctor, from the simplicity of his manners, the exactness of his taste, the elegance of his wit, and those abundant stores of classical learning, the fruits of which are well known to scholars, in a translation of Aristotle's Poetics.' The conversation of Dr Forster was peculiarly interesting to Dr Parr, from his deep and clear views upon metaphysical and political subjects; nor was their harmony for one moment disturbed by difference of opinion, upon the grounds of the American war, and the measures of Lord North's administration. Each respected the talents, and each confided in the candour of the other.

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In the summer of 1778, the head-mastership of Norwich school became vacant by the resignation of the Rev. Mr Lemon, author of an Etymological Dictionary.' As Mr Parr was not without agreeable connexions in Norfolk, and was most affectionately attached to his cousin Mr Robert Parr, who resided in Norwich, he became a candidate for the free school in that city, was elected in the autumn of 1778,