the most effect by their varied hues, are as incapable of prolonging the chain of their race as are the dried specimens in an herbal. Yet, without either the capacity of reasoning, or of understanding and being affected by reasoning, Southey, in his own line, is an admirable writer; sprightly and entertaining, without the least eccentricity or affectation, so dexterous in the management of his materials, that he seldom either tires us even when he is manifestly writing against space, or exposes himself very greatly although discussing matters of which he understands nothing, and often highly eloquent. The present article is an exceedingly characteristic one, offering evidence in every page of the defects as well as of the powers of the writer.

66

"We have seldom," says Mr. Southey, seen a character more difficult to decypher than that of Dr. Parr;" not meaning by these words, as the reader might perhaps suppose, to allude to the good doctor's handwriting (which was certainly a most inscrutable hieroglyphic), but to the man himself, moral and intellectual. The resolution given of this enigma by its proposer is, that Parr "had vast strength, but never seems to have discovered wherein it lay." If that was the case, we say, depend upon it the strength was not so vast as is imagined. We have but little faith, we confess, in that latent mental power which throughout the course of a varied life, passed in the very midst of those events, and avocations which afford the best opportunities for its exercise and display, supposing it to be of the character assumed, or even of any other at all resembling that, remains inactive and dormant, or perishes at last without leaving any thing to testify of its existence, except the memory of a few random efforts, and just as many signal discomfitures. We are not to be deluded by the magnificent funeral orations of Dr. Parr's acquaintances into a belief that he was the greatest man of his age, or even one of its great men. We, the public, know him, we apprehend, now, quite as well as any of his personal friends-in so far at least as his intellectual character is concerned. He has been brought before us by himself and others, more frequently and ostentatiously, and exhibited in a greater variety of attitudes, than almost any other man of his time-so that there is scarcely one of his peculiarities of temper, manner, or personal appearance, with which we are not every one of us familiar. But above all, Dr. Parr has made himself known to us, and shown us what was in him, and what was not in him, by a considerable variety of publications on a considerable variety of subjects. The man, or rather we should say, the best part of the man, still lives and may be examined or conversed with by any of us, in his books. And if this be deemed not enough-if it be asserted that the giant moved in fetters in the act of authorship, and that his spirit never blazed freely out except in its viva voce efforts, have we not his daily talk, small and great, chronicled by a whole legion of Boswells-by Dr. Johnstone, (to whom we mean no disrespect by naming him in this list) by Mr. Field, by Mr. Barker and his multitudinous correspondents, and by the anecdote-mongers of the newspapers and magazines in number numberless? If notoriety be fame, Dr. Parr, during his lifetime, had enough of it; and since his death, he has certainly occupied more of the letter-press of the day than any other single

We repeat,

subject, dead or alive, which it would be easy to name. therefore, that we may safely assume that, whatever Dr. Parr was in mental powers and attainments, neither posterity nor we of the present generation, can with any decency be asserted to want materials for forming a correct judgment as to that point. Yet we confess for our own parts, that Mr. Southey takes a tone with regard to the capabilities, at least, of his hero, in this paper, which we can neither sympathise with, nor account for. We do not wonder so much at the assertion, that," in philology he might have done any thing." This is merely the natural remark of a person, who, aware that Dr. Parr was a great Grecian, and not knowing any thing at all about philology, except that it is a science having something to do with languages, takes it for granted that the case must have been as he states it. The whole of the paragraph, however, in relation to this matter is as good an example as could be desired of the art of talking of what one does not understand. Where, we should like to know, has Parr done any thing entitling us to suppose that he could have produced a great work on the philosophy of language, even if he had applied his best powers to the task? On the contrary, we assert, without the least apprehension of being contradicted by any person entitled to express an opinion on the subject, that the few disquisitions he has left us in this department show nothing except his ignorance of all philosophy and all principle whatever, in so far as the constitution of speech is concerned. We care not whether the reader be a disciple of Harris, or of Horne Tooke, or of Mr. Fearne, or of any other known or unknown name in this field of enquiry; if he has only made the science in question a subject of study himself, we are sure he will agree with us in holding that Dr. Parr to a certainty never had. Let those who doubt, peruse only his two performances of greatest pretension in this line-his dissertation on the import of the Latin prefix sub, printed at the end of Dugald Stewart's Essays, and his letter to Mr. Carson on the syntax of the Latin subjunctive, which Dr. Johnstone has given in one of the volumes of his late publication. Is it here that Mr. Southey has found that metaphysical subtlety which he eulogises with such worshipful obeisance? The only light or enlivenment that we can discern about these two masses of cloudy and cumbrous pedantry, is what arises from the ludicrous vanity and self-satisfaction of the good doctor as he piles up his chaotic quotations, and goes on showing how much he has read, and how little he has thought, by every sentence that comes from his pen. Of the light of philosophy there is not a ray.

There can be no doubt of Dr. Parr's profound and extensive knowledge, both of the vocabulary of the Greek language and that of the Latin. He knew both much better than he did that of the English; his acquaintance with which was exceedingly partial, and confined in a great degree to the least valuable part of the language, to that, namely, which is a derivation from the dead tongues of antiquity, as distinguished from that which is the genuine growth of our own feelings, usages, and history, and constitutes, therefore, what best deserves to be called our pure and national English. It is this latter portion of our vocabulary, too, which forms our chief storehouse of poetical expression; and that for a very plain reason, it being here alone that we

find words which present images. Those of foreign origin can convey to us only conceptions; they are the currency with the impress worn off. Hence it is that the French have no poetic language;-their vocabulary is entirely a derivation from that of another people of different origin from themselves, whose customs and modes of thinking have in a great measure passed away, and whose tongue is therefore of necessity, a dead one, in a much more important sense than as having ceased to be popularly spoken. Such a language as the French differs from the English or the German as much as flowers plucked from where they originally grew, and preserved from withering by having their stalks inserted in water, do from those that remain rooted in their native garden, drawing always fresh life and lustrous beauty from the soil. But all this by-the-bye. Parr's command even over his native tongue, was more over its thunder than its lightning. He delighted in sonorous polysyllables, much more than in those forms of diction which, if they do not so well fill the ear, (at least as some ears, of larger capacity, require to be filled,) do much better fill the imagination and the heart. Turn either to his writings or his recorded conversations. That there is vigour and power occasionally, nay, frequently, we are far from denying; so vehement and impassioned a talker and writer must have been often an effective one; for no man who feels strongly, which Parr did, will express himself feebly, in any language under heaven. But beyond this leonine roar, and an occasional display of that rhetorical brilliancy which may also be in a great measure accounted for by the rule facit indignatio versus, is there much in any thing that Dr. Parr has written or said to entitle us to predicate of him that he was a man of extraordinary intellectual powers? Where are the ideas that he has left us? Where the single new truth we owe to him?-the thought of his that has fallen upon our mental eye like light?-the one reflection, remark, or suggestion, that ever dropped from his lips or his pen, for which the world is the wiser, or which either our hearts or memories have stored up among their treasures? Nay, of all the good things which according to his friends he was continually uttering, are there any, or above some two or three, that will bear repetition-that have wit enough in them to keep them alive, now that the loud voice and imposing gesticulation with which they were first delivered are no longer present to give them a seeming and delusive animation? It is impossible to deny that, for a professed talker and wit, even Dr. Parr's very best sayings are, generally speaking, the dullest on record. How different are his reported conversations from those of Johnson, for example, whom he strove so zealously to imitate! And are we to believe that the fallingoff is all owing to the reporters?—

All Dr. Parr's most successful efforts were in the character of a rhetorician-an adorner of other men's thoughts, not a producer of thoughts of his own. And even as such his taste was so deficient and impure, that he never wrote with much safety, except when he had a model to copy after, or rules, the stricter the better, to guide and controul him. Hence, his Epitaphs are the best things he has left us. He understood better than any man of his time the rule of this sort of writing, and practised it accordingly like an accomplished and cunning

workman. Nearly as good as his Epitaphs are some of his antithetical delineations of character, both in his Latin and English compositions. Many of these those particularly in his famous Preface, and in the Dedication of the Tracts by Warburton and a Warburtonian-are animated by a fine inspiration of personal or political feeling-and have accordingly that sort of nerve and power about them which belongs to every thing that comes warm from the heart. Yet with all their glow and sarcasm, and even occasional brilliancy, they are but the elaborations of talent; and it would be a prostitution of the term-upon any interpretation of it that may be preferred-to designate them as works of genius. Even these characters are but eloquent and stirring appeals-not living creations;-descriptions, not pictures. Yet we apprehend they are, as we have already said, of the highest class of Dr. Parr's performances.

Such being the case, we do wonder, we confess, to find Mr. Southey speaking of the Reverend Doctor's powers in the manner in which he does in some passages of this article. In one place he seems actually to place him on a level in point of genius with one of the most illustrious names in our literature. "That impatience of restraint," says he, "which vented itself in unavailing declamation on the people's rights, aided by Parr's scholarship, might have given birth to another Liberty of Prophesying. That graphic pencil which could depict the Senator with such force, might, under a different influence, have traced out another Divine Exemplar."" This is really to squander panegyric, and level distinctions, with a very reckless hand-and in a way we should not have expected from Mr. Southey, who, little conversant as he may be with any thing more than the names of the works to which he refers on the philosophy of language, undoubtedly knows and appreciates the writings of Bishop Taylor too well to deem them such as Doctor Parr could in any circumstances have produced or approached to. "Under another influence," forsooth! Is it meant that if Parr had been a Tory instead of a Whig, his works would have teemed with beauty and splendour for the admiration of all time instead of the ephemeral glitter which only he has actually given to them? or that if he had been promoted to the bench, that piece of good fortune alone, would have "touched his lips with fire from the altar?" Whatever Mr. Southey may do, we cannot carry our notions of the virtues of episcopal ordination quite so high, as to attribute to it any such miraculous efficacy as this.

Dr. Parr's taste in regard to the higher productions of imagination, and also his knowledge of English literature and the English language, may be sufficiently understood from the fact that he was one of the dupes of that silliest of all literary forgeries, the Shakspeare papers. What should we think of a classical scholar who should allow himself to be for a moment deceived by a composition in Greek or Latin in every way so wretched and so unlike the known style and manner of the writer from whose pen it professed to have come, as those productions of Ireland's are now universally felt and acknowledged to have been? Such a slip would be an annihilation to a man's pretensions to scholarship or critical sagacity-a blow which he would never recover, nor deserve to recover. We do not believe that Parr could possibly have been so taken in, had the subject of the attempted imitation been

one of his classic acquaintances instead of the great English dramatist. No; his memory and his judgment together would have enabled him in that case to detect the illegitimate turns of phrase and of rhythm at least, in the pretended relique, and we verily believe even to discern the lying spirit of its whole style and sentiment. Had he known Shakspeare only as well as he knew Eschylus, or Sophocles, or Euripides, or English as well as Greek, the clumsy imposition would not have deceived him. But the fact that he was deceived is at all events decisive as to his claims as a judge of poetry-even more so, we are almost disposed to think, that the verdict he passed many years afterwards on a certain Reverend John Stewart, author of The Pleasures of Love,' and a long list of other effusions with which we can scarcely hope that any of our readers are familiar, whom he ranked (according to that gentleman's own account; see Mr. Barker's volume p. 87,) among, if not at the very head of, the few genuine poets of the age. The passage is really so exquisite a one that, in justice to Mr. Stewart, who we apprehend is not so well known as he deserves to be, we will transcribe it :

.

"One morning," says the reverend bard, "he sent for me to attend him in his library. I found him seated at one side of the fire, Mrs. Parr leaning against the mantel on the opposite, and a chair placed for me between them. 'Mrs. Parr,' he began, you have seen Moore in this spot some time ago; you now see Mr. Stewart. The race of true poets is now nearly extinct. There is you,' turning to me, and Moore, and Byron, and Crabbe, and Campbell-I hardly know of another. You, Stewart, are a man of genius, of real genius, and of science, too, as well as genius. I tell you so. It is here, it is here' shaking his head, and sagaciously touching his forehead with his finger, I tell you, again, it is here! As to Walter Scott, his jingle will not outlive the next century; it is namby-pamby. I do not enumerate him with poets.'

But, although somewhat too much disposed to make a wonder of his hero, and vastly overrating, as we think, his intellectual powers, it delights us to find Mr. Southey doing justice to Parr, in regard to a part of his character, which can scarcely be overrated-we mean his heart and moral nature. Here Parr was really a noble fellow. Weaknesses he had, no doubt, (who is without them?) and, like all other men of warm temperament, he may, in the course of his life, have committed some blunders, which a cooler or harder heart would have saved him from. Of the former, the most conspicuous was merely an exceedingly amusing vanity, which made himself happy, and seldom greatly annoyed any one else. His errors in conduct (to use the phraseology of this very wise and correct world) were merely the precipitancies and imprudencies of an intensely honest and generous nature -for which we honour him. Of Dr. Parr's political career we cannot expect a very impartial account from the present reviewer of his life and writings; but, upon the whole, what is said upon that subject has less prejudice, and more charity in it than we were perhaps entitled to anticipate. The summing up of his character in the following paragraph is as just as it is eloquent :

"At est bonus"-but, with all his splendid failings, he had splendid