332 LEAVES THEY HAVE TOUCHED. 



of mind ; but they are drilled into good manners by their surround- 

 ings ; they are made to know and keep their place by the respectable 

 talents and culture of a multitude of other people. Parr's learning, 

 and Johnson's too, so far as it was formal and scholastic, was of a 

 type which in the present age has ceased to be honoured, consisting 

 of a familiarity with the letter of two dead languages, acquired 

 unphilosophieally, and used of necessity in a petty, contracted way. 

 These two men, with a large group of contemporaries whom they 

 conspicuously represented, were for the most part outside the noble 

 sphere in which scholars of the present day find their pastime. Com- 

 parative philology, universal history, science in the modern sense, 

 theoretical and applied, were to them, sealed mysteries.-— Parr, by 

 some chance, was led to adopt the principles of the Whigs ; hence he 

 is patronized by Macaulay, who goes out of his way to introduce his 

 name in his narrative of the trial of Warren Hastings, and tq style 

 him at the same time the greatest scholar of the age. " There," he 

 says, i.e. in Westminster Hall, while Burke was arraigning the great 

 proconsul of India, " there were to be seen side by side the greatest 

 painter and the greatest scholar of the age. The spectacle had allured 

 Reynolds from that easel which has preserved to us the thoughtful 

 foreheads of so many writers and statesmen, and the sweet smiles of 

 so many noble matrons. It had induced Parr to suspend his labours 

 in that dark and profound mine from which he had extracted a vast 

 treasure of erudition — a treasure too often buried in the earth, too 

 often paraded with injudicious and inelegant ostentation, but still 

 precious, massive g,nd splendid." On the other hand, Sydney Smith, 

 also a Whig, ventures to say of Parr that he was rude and violent, 

 as most Greek scholars are, unless they happen to be bishops (a little 

 •oke this, at the expense of Bishop Blomfield). " He has left nothing 

 behind him," Sydney Smith goes on to say, " worth leaving ; he was 

 rather fitted for the Law than the Church, and would have been a 

 more considerable man, if he had been more knocked about among 

 his equals. He lived with country gentlemen and clergymen, who 

 flattered and feared him." The diocese of Gloucester had a narrow 

 escape. It came within an ace of having Parr as its bishop. 



The tobacco pipe was an inseparable adjunct of Parr, and con- 

 tributed not a little to the coarseness of his character. In a small 

 Hogarthian sketch of him given in the IS^ational Illustrated Library \ 

 edition of Boswell's Johnson, he is represented with it in his hand. 



