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In taking a final leave of any interesting man, whom (whether as writers or as readers) we had accompanied through the chances and changes of a biographic record, although it is true that what in such a man first engaged our notice must have been something by which he was distinguished from his fellows, not the less what we should most regard in him when seen for the last time, would be those points in which he simply resembled them. True it is, that he never could have won the right to such a biographic memorial except by differing from his brothers: nevertheless it is certain, that our last gaze would settle upon the points in which he agreed with them; upon his passions and his fortunes; upon the calamitous incidents of his life, and the magnanimity with which he supported them; upon his infirmities as a child of earth, and his consolations as a child of heavenly hopes.

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Bentley's life, through forty years (that is, through the entire period of his mature manhood), had been one unrelenting combat with malignant enemies. And yet this singular result had followed, that his enemies reaped the full harvest of mortification and wrath which such a rancorous feud was fitted to produce, whilst he through all this period had enjoyed a sunshine of perpetual peace. The storm had raved through forty years tormenting the very air up to the barriers of Bentley's doors and windows; but it had never been suffered to gain an entrance, or to violate the sanctity of his happy fireside; even as the life-destroying vapours in coal mines suffer an arrest at the very moment when they reach the meshes of the safety-lamp. One golden sanctuary did Bentley enjoy, and that was his own hearth; one unfailing comforter, and that was his own wife.

Her at length he lost. From her, after a union of forty years, during which her confidential advice, but still more her faithful sympathy, had cheered and sustained him often through great difficulties, but at some periods through great dangers, at last the grave parted him. And the opinion of all men was, that now beyond a doubt he would drift away into hopeless gloom. But, just as his last anchor was unsettling, and beginning to drive before this great billowy anguish, suddenly a new morning of consolation ascended for him a resurrection of pathetic hopes. His married daughter came to Trinity Lodge, and by her pious attentions first of all recalled him from wandering thoughts and unprofitable fretting. Next, she drew him at intervals within the circle of her children; led him to take an interest in their joyous sports; and filled his halls with the music of infant laughter, which for seventy years had been a sound unknown to him. An Indian summer crept stealthily over his closing days; a summer less gaudy than the mighty summer of the solstice, but sweet, golden, silent; happy, though sad; and to Bentley, upon whom (now eighty years old) his last fatal illness rushed as suddenly as it moved rapidly through all its stages, it was never known that this sweet mimicry of summer a spiritual or fairy echo of a mighty music that has departed-is as frail and transi

tory as it is solemn, quiet, and lovely.57

DR. PARR AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.*

PART I.

THE time is come when, without offence, the truth may be spoken of Dr. Parr.58 Standing by the side of the grave, men's eyes, as it were, fastened upon the very coffin of an excellent person, all literary people under any restraint of honorable feelings - all writers who have trained themselves to habits of liberal sympathy and of generous forbearance everybody, in short, but the very rash or very juvenile, the intemperate or malignant put a seal upon their lips. Grief, and the passionate exaggerations of grief, have a title to indulgent consideration, which, in the upper walks of literature, is not often infringed; amongst polished Tories, amongst the coterie of this journal, we may

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* The Works of Samuel Parr, LL.D. with Memoirs of hi Life and Writings, and a Selection from his Correspondence. By JOHN JOHNTSONE, M. D.

Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Opinions of the Rev. Samuel Parr, LL.D. With Biographical Notices of many of his Friends, Pupils, and Contemporaries. By the REV. WIL LIAM FIELD.

Parriana; or Notices of the Rev. Samuel Parr, LL.D. By E. H. BARKER, Esq.

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say never. On this principle it was that we prescribed to ourselves most willingly a duty of absolute silence at the time of Dr. Parr's death, and through the years immediately succeeding. The sorrow of his numerous friends was then keen and raw. For a warm-hearted man - and Dr. Parr was such- there is an answerable warmth of regret. Errors and indiscretions are forgotten; virtues are brought forward into high relief; talents and accomplishments magnified beyond all proportions of truth. These extravagances are even graceful and becoming under the immediate impulses which prompt them: and for a season they are, and ought to be, endured. But this season has its limits. Within those limits the rule is ·De mortuis nil nisi bonum.59 Beyond them, and when the privilege of recent death can no longer be sustained, this rule gives way to another — De mortuis nil nisi verum et probabiliter demonstratum. This canon has now taken effect with regard to Dr. Parr. The sanctities of private grief have been sufficiently respected, because the grief itself has submitted to the mitigation of time. Enough has been conceded to the intemperance of sorrowing friendship: the time has now arrived for the dispassionate appreciation of equity and unbiassed judgment.

Eighteen years have passed away since we first set eyes upon Dr. Samuel Parr. Off and on through the nine or ten years preceding, we had heard him casually mentioned in Oxford, but not for any good. In most cases, the anecdote which brought up his name was some pointless parody of a Sam-Johnsonian increpation, some Drury-Lane counterfeit of the true Jovian thunderbolts:

'Demens qui nimbos et non imitabile fulmen

Ære et cornipedum sonitu simularet equorum.'

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In no instance that we recollect had there appeared any felicity in these colloquial fulminations of Dr. Parr. With an unlimited license of personal invective, and with an extravagance of brutality not credible, except in the case of one who happened to be protected by age and by his petticoats, consequently with one power more than other people enjoy, who submit themselves to the restraints of courtesy, and to the decencies of social intercourse, the Doctor had yet made nothing of his extra privilege, nor had so much as once attained a distinguished success. There was labor, indeed, and effort enough, preparation without end, and most tortuous circumgyration of periods; but from all this sonorous smithery of hard words in osity and ation, nothing emerged - no wrought massy product but simply a voluminous smoke. Such had been the fortune, whether fairly representing the general case or not, of our own youthful experience at second-hand in respect to Dr. Parr, and his colloquial prowess. When we add, that in those years of teeming and fermenting intellects, at a crisis so agitating for human interests upon the very highest scale, no mere philologists or grammaticaster- though he had been the very best of his class— could have held much space in our thoughts; and, with respect to Dr. Parr in particular, when we say that all avenues to our esteem had been foreclosed from our boyish days by one happy sarcasm of the Pursuits of Literature, where Parr had been nicknamed, in relation to his supposed model, the Birmingham Doctor; and, finally, when we assure the reader that he was the one sole specimen

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