and removed thither in January, 1779. He introduced many useful improvements in the instruction and government of that school, and remained there till Michaelmas, 1785, when he resigned his office.

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As the academical studies of Dr Parr had been interrupted by his acceptance of the bead-assistantship in Harrow school, 1767, he, of course, could not proceed regularly to the degree of A. B. He kept. however, his name upon the books of Emanuel college, and he intended to perform his exercises for a bachelorship in divinity, which, according to the custom of the university, was granted to non-resident members, who had been in holy orders for ten years. But, in 1771, when he became a canditate for the mastership at Harrow, he found it necessary to have the degree of A. M., as required by the will of the founder: he therefore applied to the duke of Grafton, chancellor of Cambridge, who, with great kindness, recommended him to the heads of colleges. They afterwards put their names to the proper papers; the royal signature was obtained for a mandate; and, in the winter of 1771, the doctor was made a master of arts. Supposing that a doctor's degree would be creditable to him as a teacher, and wishing to get it by the earliest opportunity, he, in opposition to the advice of his much respected tutor, Mr Hobard, went over to the law line. Hence, in proceeding to the degree of doctor, he for the first time brought his erudition and his talents within the view of the university. The subject of a thesis, which he delivered July 5th, 1774, was Hæres ex delicto defuncti non tenetur;' and on the succeeding Friday, he read another thesis upon the following subject, Jus interpretandi leges privatis, perinde ac principi, constat.' The schools were unusually crowded for both days; and when the disputation began, the doctor showed, that his long absence from the university had not lessened his talent for promptness of reply, and subtlety of distinction in the logical form of academical exercise. But the attention of his hearers was chiefly excited by the variety, and, in some instances, the novelty of the arguments which he adduced in his theses, by the copiousness of his diction, by the harmony of his sentences, and by the extensive knowledge of those historical facts and legal principles which were connected with his questions. In the first of his theses, he paid many splendid compliments to the memory of Mr Charles Yorke: opposed the doctrines which that celebrated man had defended in his book upon the law of forfeiture; and resisted the authority of every passage quoted by Mr Yorke, from the correspondence between Cicero and Brutus, on the ground that the correspondence itself is not genuine. The mind of the doctor had been previously impressed by the reasoning of Mr Markland, with whom he sided against the learned Gesner. Dr Halifax, then professor of law, was delighted with the unusual elegance of the composition delivered by Dr Parr in the law schools; and at close of what is called the professor's determination, earnestly entreated the doctor to commit them to the press. With this request the doctor, for some unknown reasons, did not comply; but was content to complete his degree at the commencement of 1781.

Soon after his removal to Norwich, he was curate to the Rev. William Tapps, and served the churches of St George, Colgate, and St Saviour. There he preached some well written discourses; of which it has been said, that they were now and then above the level of the apprehension

of his hearers. But he frequently addressed them without preparation, and was accustomed to select for illustration some difficult passage, or some striking event, in the lessons, or the gospel, or the epistle of the day. Finding the labour of these curacies too severe for a mind which was daily employed in the duties of a school and in private studies, he did not hold them more than a twelvemonth. In the spring of 1780, he was presented by Jane, Lady Trafford, to the rectory of Asterby, in Lincolnshire; and this first preferment was bestowed on him in consequence of his attention to her only son, Mr Sigismund Trafford. In 1783, the same patroness gave him the perpetual curacy of Hatton, in Warwickshire. He resigned Asterby which Dr Thurlow, bishop of Lincoln, had advised him to resume; and he persuaded Lady Trafford to confer the living upon his curate, the Rev. Mr Fowler of Horncastle, who had no other preferment, and who, having kept Asterby till the lease upon an inclosure expired, has since found it more valuable to himself than it had been to his predecessor.

Early in 1788, the doctor was presented to the prebend of Wenlock Barnes, in St Paul's cathedral, vacant by the death of the Rev. Dr Wickins; for this prebend he had been recommended to Bishop Lowth by the earl of Dartmouth, several of whose sons had been educated by the doctor. In 1787, he had assisted the Rev. Henry Homer in a new edition of the third Book of Bellendenus, dedicated to Mr Burke, Lord North, and Mr Fox, of whose characters, and style of oratory, he drew a masterly sketch, in an elegant Latin preface. A translation of this preface, published without his consent in 1788, excited a great sensation, and, by giving greater publicity to Parr's sentiments in favour of the popular party, put an end to his hopes of preferment from government. On this account the leading whigs made a subscription in his favour, and purchased him a life annuity of £300 per annum. In 1789, he printed Tracts by Warburton and a Warburtonian, not admitted into the collection of their respective works,' which, though it is said to have been produced by hostile feelings towards Bishop Hurd, contained some admirable critical remarks. About the same time he took part in the controversy respecting White's Bampton Lectures, of which, it appeared, he had written one-fifth. The doctor, who had begun to reside at Hatton about Easter, 1786, exchanged, in 1791, his perpetual curacy there for the rectory of Waddenhoe, Northamptonshire, and stipulated for his continuance at Hatton, and the undisturbed exercise of his ministerial functions, with his successor, the Rev. Dr Nathaniel Bridges. In 1800 he preached at Christ church, Newgate street, his celebrated Spital sermon, the publication of which, with notes, gave rise to a pamphlet by Mr Godwin, in answer to Pari's attack upon his Political Justice.' In 1802, Sir Francis Burdett, with whom the doctor had scarcely any connexion, either personal or political, presented him to the rectory of Graffham in Huntingdonshire.

During the contest about the regency, several pieces of preferment were assigned to the doctor by public rumour. It is generally supposed, that if Mr Fox had lived, the doctor would have been raised to some great situation in the church; and it has been rumoured, that after the death of Fox, an excellent person, who well knew the respect of that great statesman for Dr Parr's abilities and virtues, recommended the doctor to the minister. The immediate answer given to that re

commendation is unknown, but he appears to have been on the point of obtaining a bishopric in 1807; for had my friends," he once said to a gentleman, "continued in power one fortnight longer, Dr Hungerford was to have been translated to Hereford, and I was to have had Gloucester. My family arrangements were made; and I had determined that no clergyman in my diocese, who had occasion to call upon me, should depart without partaking of my dinner;" adding, after a moment's pause, "in the house of peers I should seldom have opened my mouth, unless-unless," said he, with some warmth, "any one had presumed to attack the character of my friend Charles Fox,-and then I would have knocked him down with the full torrent of my impetuosity." In 1808, he again declined leaving Hatton, though offered the valuable rectory of Buckingham, by Mr Coke of Holkham. On the decease of Fox, he announced his intention of publishing a life of that great man; but the work which appeared in 1809, under the title of Character of the late Charles James Fox, selected, and in part written, by Philopatris Varvicensis,' did not realize the expectations of the public. From this period he appears to have been vacillating from one literary project to another. In 1818 he wrote a refutation-which was not published till after his death-of the assertion of Milne, the Catholic prelate, that Bishop Halifax had died in the Romish persuasion. In 1819 he reprinted speeches by Roger Long, and John Taylor, of Cambridge, with a critical essay and memoirs of the authors; and, in 1820, he began to take an active part in the defence of Queen Caroline. When her name was ordered to be struck out of the liturgy, he recorded his sentiments in the prayer-book of Hatton church; observing, "It is my duty as a subject and an ecclesiastic, to read what is prescribed by my sovereign as head of the church of England; but it is not my duty to express my approbation as well as yield obedience, when my feelings as a man, and my principles as a Christian, compel me to disapprove and to deplore." He was afterwards appointed her head-chaplain. Dr Parr died at the age of seventy-eight, March 6th, 1825, and was buried at Hatton.

"The doctor," says one of his pupils, writing in 1809, "now resides in a parsonage, which he has enlarged and improved; and, probably, no ecclesiastic was ever more fondly attached to the place of his resi dence, than the doctor is to Hatton. His library consists of nearly five thousand books, replete with instruction to classical scholars, to critics, to theologians, to antiquaries, and to metaphysicians. He lives with great hospitality, and his house is often honoured by the presence of men eminently distinguished by rank or by learning. His attention to the comforts and morals of his parishioners is most praiseworthy; and it may be said, with truth, that no man was ever more punctual and zealous than the doctor, in performing the various offices of a parishpriest. His discourses are instructive, his delivery animated, and in his manner of reading the prayers, correctness, ardour, and reverence are happily united. His kindness to the poor, his vigilance and activity in the management of parochial charities, and his good-natured, and almost parental, behaviour to persons of every class, have justly procured for him the affection, confidence, and respect of his parishioners. It cannot be improper to add, that the generosity and taste of the doctor have been employed in the choice of painted windows and other decora

tions for his parish-church, and that he has frequently levied contributions upon his pupils and his friends, when he has been forming plans for adorning his favourite place of worship. Though a strenuous and avowed advocate for toleration, he is firmly attached to the interests and honour of the established church; and perhaps it is to be ranked among the most valuable properties of his mind, that the consciousness of great erudition and great abilities has not slackened his diligence in those humble duties which alone he has been permitted to discharge, as an ecclesiastic. It is well known, that the intellectual powers of the doctor are strongly marked in his conversation; that he readily communicates his knowledge to those who consult him, and that he lives upon terms of the closest friendship with men of sense and virtue, whether churchmen or sectaries, whigs or tories. The regularity of his conduct in the earlier period of his life, aided by the natural strength of his constitution, has preserved him from those maladies of mind and body to which studious persons are exposed. He rises early; and after taking breakfast, which rarely continues ten minutes, he retires to his books, or writes to his numerous correspondents. He is utterly a stranger to the rural amusements of shooting and hunting, but preserves his health by gentle riding. His afternoons he likes to spend in the society of his acquaintance or his family; and, though he has now relinquished those severe and dangerous studies which the necessary business of every revolving day formerly compelled him to prosecute till midnight; yet upon some occasions, his mind is employed with great activity till ten or eleven o'clock in the evening. The habits of industry, which he acquired in boyhood, are indeed quite undiminished; his curiosity for the attainment of fresh knowledge is unabated; and such is his perseverance, even on the threshold of his grand climacteric, that, when perplexed by the construction of a sentence, or the signification of a single word, he will instantly consult ten or twenty authors, till his doubts are removed. The general course of his reading lies in those books which hold the chief rank in the libraries of scholars, and which require the severest exercise of the understanding. But, when modern publications are recommended to him, as worthy of his perusal, he reads them with eagerness, and converses upon their contents with acuteness and vivacity. His remembrance of events and names, and his readiness and accuracy in quoting pertinent passages from authors both ancient and modern, were surpassed only by the wonderful, and perhaps unparalleled, faculties of the same kind in Professor Porson. The rapidity with which the doctor composes, or dictates upon every subject which interests him, would be almost incredible to those who have not been immediate observers of the fact. But when his eyes are directed towards his own confused hand-writing, evident marks of shame and regret may be observed in his countenance; and to his most confidential companions he has repeatedly declared, that the perplexity which he finds in reading what he has formerly put to paper, in his own scrawl, and the difficulty which he experiences in getting precarious, irregular, and sometimes reluctant assistance from his visitors, are among the chief causes of his disinclination to lay before the world the results of his laborious and various inquiries. He is well aware how much the scantiness of his publications has been blamed by his friends and by strangers; and so far as his inabilit to write intelligibly has occasion

ed that scantiness, it seems to be lamented quite as seriously by himself as by other men. Dr Johnson, in his Lives of English Poets,' has occasionally recorded their infirmities and singularities; and probably some future biographer will think it worth his while to collect and describe those from which Dr Parr is not exempt. The most remarkable which have fallen under my notice, are his fits of slovenliness and pomp in matters of dress; his aversion to the taste of cheese; his fondness for smoking tobacco; his extraordinary skilfulness in ringing church-bells; and his whimsical, but invincible resolution of playing for a nominal stake only, at games which he understands very well, and in which he confessedly finds the most agreeable relaxation for his leisure hours."

"His pretensions as a man of letters," says a writer in Blackwood's Magazine, "were splendid, and fitted, under a suitable guidance, to have produced a more brilliant impression on his own age than they really did, and a more lasting one in the next age than they ever will. In his life-time, it is true, the applauses of his many pupils, and his great political friends, to a certain extent made up for all deficiencies on his own part; but now, when these vicarious props are withdrawn, the disproportion is enormous, and hereafter will appear to be more so, between the talents that he possessed, and the effects that he accomplished." In addition to the works already mentioned, Parr wrote numerous reviews, memoirs, epitaphs, prefaces, &c. In 1828, appeared 'Memoirs of his Life and Writings,' by John Johnstone, M.D.; and in the same year was published Parriana.'

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Henry Martyn.

BORN A. D. 1781.-DIED A. D. 1812.

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HENRY MARTYN was born at Truro, in Cornwall, February 18th, 1781. Mr John Martyn, his father, had been a labourer in the mines; but, in the intervals of toil, he had studied arithmetic and the mathematics, and rendered himself fit for a higher rank in society. He became chief clerk in a inercantile office, was pious and respectable, and enjoyed considerably more than a competency. Henry was placed in a grammar-school before he was eight years old, and before he was fifteen competed for a vacant scholarship at Oxford; he failed, but, " in the opinion of some of the examiners," he ought to have been elected, though he subsequently rejoiced at this failure: "Had I become a member of the university, the profligate acquaintance I had there would have introduced me to a scene of debauchery in which I must, in all probability, from my extreme youth, have sunk for ever." He returned for two years to the grammar-school, and, in October, 1797, repaired to Cambridge, and commenced his residence at St John's college. the public examination in December he cbtained a reputable place in the first class; at the next examination, in the summer, he reached the second station in the first class; and at the examination at Christmas, 1799, he was first. His name stood first upon the list at the college examination, in the summer of the year 1800; for his decided superiority in mathematics the highest academical honour was adjudged him in

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