LEAVES THEY HAVE TOUCHED. 333 



When appointed to preach before the University of Cambridge, he was 

 puffing his pipe in the vestry-room of the church up to the moment of 

 his entering the pulpit. An early pupil of his recalls, rather graphi- 

 cally, a domestic scene in which again the pipe figures : " I was fre- 

 quently sent by him," he says, " to obtain the Cotirier newspaper, and, 

 upon my return, he made me read to him the Parliamentary debates, 

 which were at that period full of interest. I sometimes took a 

 malicious pleasure in giving the utmost possible effect to the brilliant 

 passages in Pitt's speeches, upon which the Doctor would exclaim, 



* Why, you noodle, do you dwell with such energy upon Pitt's empty 

 declamation 1 ' At other moments he would say, ' That is powerful, 

 but Fox will answer it.' When I pronounced the words 'Mr. Fox 

 rose,' Parr would roar out ' Stop ! ' and after shaking the ashes out of 

 his pipe, and filling it afresh, he would add, with a marked emphasis, 



* ISTow, you dog, do your best ! ' In the course of the speech in 

 question, he would often interrupt me in a tone of triumphant exul- 

 tation with exclamations such as the following : ' To be sure ! ' — 

 ' Capital ! '— < Answer that if you can, Master Pitt 1 ' — and at the 

 conclusion : ' That is the speech of the orator and statesman : Pitt 

 is a mere rhetorician ; ' adding, after a pause, ' a very able one, I 

 admit.' Sometimes after hearing the first three or four sentences of 

 a, speech of Mr. Pitt, he would say, ' Now the dog is tliinking what 

 he will say : Fox rushes into the subject at once.' Here let me 

 J:-emark," adds the reporter of this scene, " that when Parr called 

 any of his pupils Twodle or dog, or even, in some instances, blocMiead, 

 it was a proof that they were in high favour, and on these occasions 

 his good-natured smile showed that he spoke in perfect good humour; 

 but the Word dunce he always used contemptuously." Parr was 

 unfortunate in his wife, who ^^delighted in worrying him. Porson 

 used to say "Parr would have been a great man but for three 

 things— 'his trade, his wife, and his politics." 



Edward Henry Barker, of Thetford, in Norfolk, published two 

 volumes of " Parriana, or Notices of the Rev. Samuel Parr, LL.D., 

 collected from various sources, printed and manuscript." Mr, Barker 

 had lived for several years in Parr's house at Halton, revelling in 

 the curious, out-of-the-way contents of his library. The Quarterly 

 Review uses this irreverent language of the death of Dr. Parr : 

 **The demise," it says, "of the awful Chimeera of Halton, which 

 liad so long buzzed in vacuo, was something of an event in 1825." 



