date for Colchester, as a candidate for Norwich, he was uniformly successful as far as it is possible that encouragement the most liberal, on the part of others, can overrule a man's own imprudence. The mastership of Norwich has certainly been considered a valuable prize by others. How it happened that Parr found it otherwise, or whether mere restlessness and love of change were his governing motives, does not appear; but it is certain, that in August 1785, he sent in his resignation; and at Easter 1786, he went to reside at the parsonage house of Hatton, in the county of Warwick, where he opened a private academy. And though, as old age advanced, he resigned his pupils, Hatton continued to be his place of residence.

This, then, was the haven, the perpetual curacy of Hatton, into which Dr Parr steered his little boat, when he had already passed the meridian of his life. And (except upon a visit) he never again left it for any more elevated abode. For a philosopher, we grant that a much happier situation cannot be imagined than that of an English rural parson, rich enough to maintain a good library. Dr Parr was exactly in those circumstances; but Dr Parr was no philosopher. And assuredly this was not the vision which floated before his eyes at Stanmore, when he was riding on his "black saddle," in prelatical pomp, with his ivory crosier in his fist. The coach-and-four and mitred panels, must then have flourished in the foreground of the picture. But at that time he was between 25 and 30: now he was turned 40-an age when, if a man should not have made his fortune, at least he ought to see clearly before him the road by which it is to be made. Now what was Parr's condition at this time, in respect to that supreme object of his exertions ?We have no letter on that point in this year, 1786: but we have one in 1782, when it does not appear (and indeed can hardly be supposed possible) that his situation was materially different. Writing to a man

whom he valued, but then under a cloud of distress, and perhaps wishing to excuse himself for not sending him money, he thus states the result of his labours up to that date :-"You desire my confidence; and I therefore add, that the little progress I have made in worldly matters, the heavy loss I have sustained by the war, the inconsiderable advantages I have gained by a laborious and irksome employment, and the mortifying discouragements I have met with in my clerical profession, have all conspired to depress my spirits, and undermine my constitution. I was content to give up ecclesiastical preferment, while I had a prospect of making some comfortable provision for my old age in my business as a teacher: but the best of my years have now elapsed; and I am, through a most vexatious and trying series of events, not a shilling richer than when I went to Stanmore. I have this very week closed an account, on which I stood indebted near £2000, which I was obliged to borrow when I launched into active life. My house at Stanmore, I sold literally for less money than I expended on the repairs only. To this loss of more than a thousand pounds, I am to add near £700, which I may lose entirely, and must lose in a great measure, by the reduction of St Vincent and St Kitt's. My patience, so far as religion prescribes it, is sufficient to support me under this severity of moral trial. But the hour is past in which I might hope to secure a comfortable independency; and I am now labouring under the gloomy prospect of toiling, with exhausted strength, for a scanty subsistence to myself and my family. It is but eighteen months that I could pronounce a shilling my own. Now, indeed, meo sum pauper in are-but my integrity I have ever held fast."

Possibly; but integrity might also have been held fast in a deanery; and certainly Dr Parr will not pretend to hoax us with such a story, as, that " integrity" was all that he contemplated from his black saddle in Stanmore. Undoubtedly, he

framed to himself some other good things, so fortunately arranged, that they could be held in commendam with integrity. Such, however, was the naked fact, and we are sorry for it, at the time when Dr Parr drew near to his fortieth year-at which age, as all the world knows, a man must be a fool if he is not a physician. Pass on, reader, for the term of almost another generation; suppose Dr Parr to be turned of sixty, and the first light snows of early old age to be just beginning to descend upon him, and his best wig to be turning grey;—were matters, we ask, improved at that time? Not much. Twenty years from that Easter on which he had entered the gates of Hatton, had brought him within hail of a bishopric; for his party were just then in power. Already he could descry his sleeves and his rochet; already he could count the pinnacles of his cathedral;-when suddenly Mr Fox died, and his hopes evanesced in spiral wreaths of fuming Orinoco. Unfortunate Dr Parr! Once before he had conceived himself within an inch of the mitre; that was in the king's first illness, when the regency intrigue gave hopes, at one time, that Mr Pitt would be displaced. Dr Parr had then been summoned up to London; and he had gone so far as to lay down rules for his episcopal behaviour. But the king suddenly recovered; many a grasping palm was then relaxed abruptly; and, alas! for Dr Parr, whether people died or recovered, the event was equally unfor tunate. Writing, on August 25, 1807, to the Bishop of Down, he says,"If Mr Fox had lived and continued in power, he certainly would have made me a bishop." Now, if Dr Parr meant to say that he had a distinct promise to that effect, that certainly is above guessing; else we should almost presume to guess, that Mr Fox neither would, nor possibly could, have made Dr Parr a bishop. It is true, that Mr Fox meant to have promoted the Bishop of Llan

daff of that day, who might seem to stand in the same circumstances as a literary supporter; at least Lord Holland said to a friend of ours,"Had our party remained in office, we should have raised the Bishop of Llandaff to the Archbishopric of York." But then why? Lord Holland's reason was this,-" For he" (meaning Dr Watson)" behaved very well, I can assure you, to us," (meaning by us the whole coalition probably of Grenvilles and Foxes.) Now, this reason (we fear) did not apply, in Mr Fox's mind, to Dr Parr; he had behaved violently, indiscreetly, foolishly, on several occasions; he had thoroughly disgusted all other parties; he had not satisfied his own. And once, when, for a very frivolous reason, he gave a vote for Mr Pitt at the Cambridge election, we are satisfied ourselves that he meditated the notable policy of ratting; conceiving, perhaps, that it was a romantic and ideal punctilio of honour to adhere to a doomed party; and the letter of Lord John Townshend, on that occasion, convinces us, that the Whigs viewed this very suspicious act in that light. Even Dr Johnstone, we observe, doubts whether Mr Fox would have raised Dr Parr to the mitre. And, as to everybody else, they shuddered at his very name. The Chancellor, Lord Thurlow, gave him a hearty curse, more suo, instead of a prebend; and Lord Grenville assigned, as a reason against making him a bishop, his extreme unpopularity with his own order. As one proof of that, even the slight distinction of preaching a visitation sermon had never once been offered to Dr Parr, as he himself tells us, in 1816, when he had completed his seventieth year, notwithstanding he had held preferment in five different counties. Nor was it, in fact, offered for six years more; and then, being a hopeful young gentleman of seventy-six, he thought proper to decline the invitation.

Next, for the emoluments of his profession,-Was he better off, as

regards them? Else, whence came the coach-and-four? We answer, that, by mere accidents of good luck, and the falling-in of some extraordinary canal profits, Dr Parr's prebend in the cathedral of St Paul's, given to him by Bishop Lowth upon the interest of Lord Dartmouth, in his last year or two, produced him an unusually large sum; so that he had about three thousand a-year; and we are glad of it. He had also an annuity of three hundred a-year, granted by the Dukes of Norfolk and Bedford in consideration of a subscription made for Dr Parr by his political friends. But this was a kind of charity which would not have been offered, had it not been felt that, in the regular path of his profession, he had not drawn, nor was likely to draw, any conspicuous prizes. In fact, but for the two accidents we have mentioned, his whole regular income from the church, up to a period of advanced age, when Sir Francis Burdett presented him to a living of about L.200 per annum, was L.93 on account of his living and L.17 on account of his prebend.

Such were the ecclesiastical honours, and such the regular ecclesiastical emoluments of Samuel Parr. We do not grudge him the addition, as regards the latter, which, in his closing years, he drew from the liberality of his friends and the accidents of luck. On the contrary, we rejoice that his last days passed in luxury and pomp; that he sent up daily clouds of undulating incense to the skies; and that he celebrated his birthday with ducal game and venison from the parks of princes; finally, we rejoice that he galloped about in his coach-and-four, and are not angry that, on one occasion, he nearly galloped over ourselves.

Still, we rejoice that all these luxuries came to him irregularly, and not at all, or indirectly, and by accident, through the church. regards that, and looking not to the individual, but entirely to the example, we rejoice that, both for her honours and emoluments, Dr Parr missed them altogether. Such be

the fate, we pray heartily, of all unfaithful servants, in whatsoever profession, calling, or office of trust! So may those be still baffled and confounded, who pass their lives in disparaging and traducing their own honourable brethren; and who labour (whether consciously and from treachery, or half-consciously and from malice and vanity) for the subversion of institutions which they are sworn and paid to defend!

Our conclusion, therefore, the epimuthion of our review, is this-that, considered as a man of the world, keenly engaged in the chase after rank and riches, Dr Parr must be pronounced to have failed; that his rare and late successes were casual and indirect; whilst his capital failures were due exclusively to himself. His two early bosom-friends and schoolfellows, Dr Bennet and Sir W. Jones, he saw raised to the rank of a bishop and a judge whilst he was himself still plodding as a schoolmaster. And this mortifying distinction in their lots was too obviously imputable, not to any more scrupulous integrity in him, flattering and soothing as that hypothesis was to his irritated vanity, but solely to his own hot-headed defect of selfcontrol-baffling the efforts of his friends, and neutralizing the finest opportunities. Both of those eminent persons, the bishop, as well as the judge, deeply disapproved of his conduct; though they agreed in candour, and in the most favourable construction of his meaning; and though they allowed him the largest latitude for his politics-one of them being a liberal Tory, and the other an ardent Whig. And yet, with the full benefit of this large privilege, he could not win their toleration to his indiscretions. So that, purely by his own folly, and in headstrong opposition to the concurring tendencies of his opportunities and his aids, Samuel Parr failed utterly as a man of the world. It remains to enquire

how much better he succeeded in establishing his character as a politician, a scholar, and a divine.

VOL. XXIX. NO, CLXXV.

F

WE devoutly hope that Sir R. Peel's promised motion on the Police will cause, not only the Legislature, but also the whole community, to examine most severely and impartially the new principles of domestic government, which are receiving such comprehensive application.

The new system of Police confessedly forms one of the greatest inroads on the principles and practice of the British Constitution that modern times have witnessed. An intense feeling of hostility to it prevails in the Metropolis, which actuates the middle classes, as well as the multitude, flows much less from party prejudice and misrepresentation, than fair experiment, and forms, in a revolutionary period like this, an important source of discontent and disaffection. It is in course of extension to most populous places, and circumstances have just proved that it can easily be perverted into an engine of the most improper and dangerous character. Here is one very conclusive reason for the examination we have named.

Another is formed by this. The New Police makes, in a certain degree, a most vicious change in the magistracy, and it is connected and combined with another mighty inroad on the principles and practice of the constitution, which is calculated to give it the most mischievous operation possible, viz. the regular adoption in principle, and to a considerable extent in practice, of a stipendiary magistracy.

As a third, we have the virtual decision of the Executive and Legislative, that at least the people of England can be no longer governed by their ancient institutions and laws, by that constitution which has been so long boasted of so immeasurably, worshipped so ardently,and identified so essentially with England's greatness and happiness. We are assured, on such grave authority, that morals and subordination have declinedvice, crime, and turbulence have increased-the national character has retrograded to an extent so mighty, as to put mere improvement out of the question, and call for a new system of local government, the reverse of the old one in both form and spi

rit. This forms a question which could not be surpassed in perilous magnitude. Local, must always in a great measure determine both the shape and character of general, government; and to the mass of the population, a vicious, tyrannical local government must be a greater Scourge than an absolute monarchy.

In

In addition, the spirit of both the executive and legislative, in late years, has been radically changed. It has become theoretic, anti-popular, stern, savage, and arbitrary. making its sweeping alterations, it has disdained to seek instruction at home, and to consult the disposition and circumstances of the people to be affected by them. Gathering its theories in foreign parts, it is not only ravished with the Code Napoleon, but it must have its Napoleon Police, its Napoleon Magistrates, and its Napoleon Maxims of governing. All is to be done by mandate and force, and nothing by influence and feeling; a worthless skeleton of freedom is to be animated by a soul of tyranny. Its alterations, saying nothing of the ruin and misery they have produced, have placed the empire on the brink of destruction; if it be carried a single step farther, nothing can save it.

The principle of keeping physical force, to the utmost extent possible, from the hands of the Executive, enters into the essence of national liberty. It is, without it, little better than useless labour to fashion constitutions, to erect limited monarchies and republics. All must be name and shadow, sound and pageantry, incapable of being turned to effectual use, if ample security be not given to the full exercise of popular right and privilege. The latter exist as means of watching, opposing, and restraining the Executive, therefore it has the most interest in preventing their exercise when this is the most necessary; and its power of prevention must be in proportion to its command over physical force. An error more loaded with ignorance and contradiction could not well be conceived than this, to create a power for placing the Monarch under limitations, and then to enable

him to intimidate and influence it, to convert despotism into freedom, and then to clothe the Executive with the means of controlling the only things which can restrain it from being a practical despotism.

The founders of British liberty were not only far more knowing, but infinitely more honest, in such matters, than their descendants are; therefore, every sentence of the hallowed creed they formed, and every portion of the magnificent fabric they reared, display and enforce the maxim -Compel the Executive to govern as much as possible by the instrumentality of law alone, and as little as possible by the use of physical power; keep the things, through which only it can be duly restricted, sacred from its influence. The wholesome jealousy of the army, which they made a leading constitutional feeling, related as much to the nature of its employment as to its strength. It was to be not only confined to the lowest number admitted of by public safety, but prohibited from being used by the Executive, save against the foreign foe, or the open rebel. Its presence was not even to be tolerated when the people were exercising their privileges, and it was only to be employed to repress commotion in extreme cases, and under the direction and responsibility of independent magistrates. While the Executive was thus to be prohibited, as far as possible, from using the army as a means of governing, it was also to be prohibited from having any influence over the physical force requisite for preserving peace and order. The people themselves were to supply, select, and employ this force, under due responsibility.

This was, until recently, held to be so true and essential, that it was kept sacred from the feuds of party; Whig and Tory vied with each other in maintaining it, and even the government professed for it the highest reverence. In a few short years, without struggle or debate, and by general consent, it has been abandoned for the reverse.

The police officer is really a soldier in disguise; in some respects he is a more dangerous character than the soldier. What difference does it make in the eye of the constitution,

whether his coat be a blue or a red one; or whether he be armed with a staff or a firelock? He is as much the mercenary and slave of the Executive, as the soldier; and the latter is always in readiness to assist him, if the firelock and bayonet be necessary.

Certain of his duties are of the most detestable description; one is, he is to make himself a general spy. It is no defence of this to say, it is necessary for enabling him to know and trace bad characters. No great abuse might flow from it, if he acted solely under the direction of inde pendent magistrates; because they would have no interest in wishing him to obtain improper knowledge. But he is the menial of the Ministry, which, through his superior, can at pleasure make him a political spy, and employ him in the worst kinds of espionage.

Such a spy must of course be a finished tool of corruption. Knowing, in conjunction with his brethren, every one's person and character, he is exactly the man to form the Ministry's acting or directing agent, for spreading amidst the people, in their political proceedings, disunion, treachery, and profligacy,-for bribing and intimidating electors, dividing and swaying public meetings, &c. &c. Through him a Ministry may generally have the rabble and its leaders in its pay, and use them for rendering the exercise of popular rights and liberties a nullity; it will be remembered that this has been, to a certain extent, practised in late years by men in power.

Another of his duties is to disperse assemblages, however small, peaceable, and innocent they may be. If two or three friends be merely at mid-day standing near the door of one of them he possesses the power, and has been known to exercise it, of ordering them to "move on." No sanction of the magistrate, or call of the citizen, or breach of the peace, or danger of any kind, is requisite as his authority; but at his own will and caprice he can, if half-a-dozen people be conversing quietly on the street, command them into motion; and disobedience to him, is guilt to be punished on his own evidence. Thus, at an election, when the constitution will not suffer a soldier to