PARR, SssusEL, LL.D., a once notable scholar, was b. Jan. 15, 1747, at Harrow-on He entered Emanuel college, Cambridge, in 1765; but the death of his father, two years afterward, necessitated his doing something for himself, and he was, in con sequence, induced to swept all assistant-mastership at Harrow, where he remained five years. The head mastership then becoming vacant. Parr applied for it, but was rejected, whereupon he left, and started as an independent schoolmaster. In 1777 he was appointed master or Colchester school, where he was ordained priest, and obtained the curacies of Hythe and Trinity church.. Next year he became master of Norwich school;_ lint in 1786 settled at Hatton in Watwickshire, where he spent the rest of his life. In 1787 he published an edition of Bellenden, to which he prefixed his celebrated preface, which is as remarkable for its uncompromising advocacy of whig principles as for the scrupulous Cieeronianism of its Isatinitv. He died Mar. 6, 1825.
1t is almost impossible to understand the reputation which Parr once had. None of his voluminous writings justify it. That he was in some respects an accomplished, and even a great schola•,-is undoubted, for he could write Latin of Cieeronian purity and finish; but it is equally undoubted that he never did anything with his boasted scholar ship. Parr has left the world absolutely nothing to keep it in remembrance of him, yet
his complete works (edited by Dr. J. Johnstone in 1828)—exclusive of his contributions to periodicals—form eight enormous tomes, and contain 5,734 octavo pages. many of them printed in small type. They relate to matters historical, critical, and metaphysi cal, but in all of them "the thread of Parr's verbosity is finer than the staple of his argument." What, then, gave him the fame that be certainly enjoyed during his life? Beyond all question, it was his conversational powers. He was an amazing, an over whelming talker. Bold, dogmatic, arrogant, with a memory profoundly and minutely retentive, am] with a genuine gift of ephemeral epigram, he seemed, at the tables of statesmen, and wits, and divines, to be a man of tremendous talent, capable of any liter ary feat; but tile learning and the repartee have left little trace of their existence, and posterity declines to admire the wonders that it has neither seen nor heard. See De Quincev's famous essay on " Dr. Samuel Parr on in its Relations to Litera ture" (Author's edition, vol. 5. Edin. Adam & Charles Black, 1862).