Читать книгу: «The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. Volume 13, No. 370, May 16, 1829», страница 5

ALNWICK FREEMEN

Alnwick, in Northumberland, is remarkable for the peculiar manner of making freemen. Those to be made free, or as the saying is, to leap well, assemble in the market place early on St. Mark's day on horseback, with every man a sword by his side, dressed in white, all with white night caps, attended by four chamberlains mounted and armed in the same manner. Hence they proceed with music to a large, dirty pool, called Freeman's Well, where they dismount, and draw up in a body, and then rush through the mud as fast as they can. As the water is generally very foul, they come out in a dirty condition; but after taking a dram, they put on dry clothes, remount their horses, and ride full gallop round the confines of the town, when they return, sword in hand, and are met by women decorated with ribands, bells, &c. ringing and dancing. These are called timber vasts. The houses of the new freemen are, on this day, distinguished by a holly bush, as a signal for their friends to assemble and make merry.

This ridiculous ceremony is attributed to King John, who being mired in the well, as a punishment for not mending the road, made the above custom a part of the charter of the town.

H.B.A

THE ANECDOTE GALLERY

DOCTOR PARR

How many a fine mind has been lost to mankind by the want of some propitious accident, to lead it to a proper channel; to prevent its current from "turning awry and losing the name of action!" We know not whether the story of Newton's apple be true, but it may serve for an illustration, and if that apple had not fallen, where would have been his Principia? If the Lady Egerton had not missed her way in a wood, Milton might have spent the time in which he wrote "Comus," in writing "Accidence of Grammar;" and if Ellwood, the quaker, had not asked him what he could say on "Paradise Regained," that beautiful poem (so greatly underrated) would have been lost to us.

Samuel Parr was born at Harrow-on-the-Hill, June 15 (o.s.) 1747. He was the son of Samuel Parr, a surgeon and apothecary of that place, and through him immediately descended from several considerable scholars, and remotely (as one of his biographers, Mr. Field, asserts) from Sir W. Parr, who lived in the reign of Edward IV., and whose granddaughter was Queen Catharine Parr, of famous memory. It does not appear from Parr's writings (as far as we remember) that he laid claim to this high ancestry; yet the name of Catharine, which he gave to one of his daughters, may be imagined to imply as much. His mother, whose maiden name was Mignard, was of the family of the celebrated painter. It was the accident of Parr's birthplace that, probably, laid the foundation of his fame, for to the school of his native village, then one of the most flourishing in England, he was sent in his sixth year; whilst, under other circumstances, it is likely that he would have been condemned to an ordinary education and his father's business. So many seeds is Nature constantly and secretly scattering, in order that one may fall upon a spot that shall foster it into a a plant. In his boyhood, he is described by his sister, Mrs. Bowyear, as studious after his kind, delighting in Mother Goose and the Seven Champions, and not partaking much in the sports usual to such an age. He had a very early inclination for the church, and the elements of that taste for ecclesiastical pomp, which distinguished him in after life, appeared when he was not more than nine or ten years old. He would put on one of his father's shirts for a surplice, (till Mr. Sanders, the vicar, supplied him, as Hannah did his namesake, with a little gown and cassock;) he would then read the church service to his sister and cousins, after they had been duly summoned by a bell tied to the banisters; preach them a sermon, which his congregation was apt to think, in those days, somewhat of the longest; and even, in spite of his father's remonstrances, would bury a bird or a kitten (Parr had always a great fondness for animals) with the rites of Christian burial. Samuel was his mother's darling; she indulged all his whims, consulted his appetite, and provided hot suppers for him almost from his cradle. He was her only son, and was at this time very fair and well-favoured. Providence, however, foreseeing that at all events vanity was to be a large ingredient in Parr's composition, sent him, in its mercy, a fit of small-pox; and, with the same intent, perhaps, deprived him of a parent, who was killing her son's character by kindness. Parr never was a boy, says, somewhere, his friend and school-fellow, Dr. Bennet. When he was about nine years old, Dr. Allen saw him sitting on the churchyard gate at Harrow, with great gravity, whilst his school-fellows were all at play. "Sam. why don't you play with the others?" cried Allen. "Do not you know, sir," said he, with vast solemnity, "that I am to be a parson?" And Parr himself used to tell of Sir W. Jones, another of his school-fellows, that as they were one day walking together near Harrow, Jones suddenly stopped short, and, looking hard at him, cried out, "Parr, if you should have the good luck to live forty years, you may stand a chance of overtaking your face." Between Bennet, Parr, and Jones, the closest intimacy was formed; and though occasionally tried, it continued to the last. Sir W. Jones, indeed, was soon carried, by the tide of events, far away from the other two, and Dr. Bennet quickly shot a-head of poor Parr in the race of life, and rose to the Irish bench.

These three challenged one another to trials of skill in the imitation of popular authors—they wrote and acted a play together—they got up mock councils, and harangues, and combats, after the manner of the classical heroes of antiquity, and under their names—till, at the age of fourteen, Parr being now at the head of the school, was removed from it and placed in his father's shop.

The doctor must have found in the course of his practice, that there are some pills which will not go down—and this was one. Parr began to criticize the Latin of his father's prescriptions, instead of "making the mixture;" and was not prepared for that kind of Greek with which old Fuller's doctor was imbued, who, on being asked why it was called a Hectic fever, "Because," saith he, "of an hecking cough which ever attendeth that disease." Accordingly, Parr having in vain tried to reconcile himself to the "uttering of mortal drugs" for three years, was at length suffered to follow his own devices, and in 1765, was admitted of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Dr. Farmer was at that time tutor. Of this proficient in black letter (he was one of the earliest, and perhaps the cleverest, of his tribe) we are told by Archdeacon Butler, in a note, that he was a man of such singular indolence, as to neglect sending in the young men's accounts, and is supposed to have burnt large sums of money, by putting into the fire unopened letters, which contained remittances, conveyed remonstrances, and required answers.

At college Parr remained about fourteen months, when his resources were cut off by the sudden death of his father. On balancing his accounts, three pounds seventeen shillings appeared to be all his worldly wealth; and it has been asserted by one of the many persons who have contributed their quota to the memorabilia of Parr, that had he been aware beforehand of possessing so considerable a sum, he would have continued longer in an university which he quitted with a heavy heart, and which he was ever proud to acknowledge as his literary nursing-mother. It is melancholy to reflect on the numbers of young men who squander the opportunities afforded them at Cambridge, and Oxford, without a thought; "casting the pearl away, like the Aethiop," while, at the very moment, many are the sons of genius and poverty, who, with Parr, are struggling in vain to hold fast their chance of the learning, and the rewards of learning, to be gained there, and which would be to them instead of house and land. Thus were Parr's hopes again nipped in the bud, and those years, (the most valuable of all, perhaps, for the formation of character,) the latter years of school and college life, were to him a blank. Meanwhile Dr. Sumner, then master of Harrow, offered him the situation of his first assistant. With this Parr closed; he took deacon's orders in 1769; and five years passed away, as usefully and happily spent as any which he lived to see. It was while he was under-master of Harrow that he lost his cousin, Frank Parr, then a recently elected Fellow of King's College. Parr loved him as a brother; and, though himself receiving a salary of only fifty pounds a year, and, as he says, and as may be well believed, "then very poor," he cheerfully undertook for Frank, by way of making his death-bed more comfortable, the payment of all his Cambridge debts, which proved to be two hundred and twenty-three pounds; a promise which, it is needless to say, he faithfully kept, besides settling an annuity of five pounds upon his mother.

In 1771, when Parr was in his twenty-fifth year, Dr. Sumner was suddenly carried off by apoplexy. Parr now became a candidate for the head mastership of Harrow, founding his claims on being born in the town, educated at the school, and for some years one of the assistants. The governors, however, preferred Dr. Benjamin Heath, an antagonist by whom it was no disgrace to be beaten, and whose personal merit Parr himself allowed to justify their choice. A rebellion among the boys, many of whom took Parr's part, ensued; and in an evil hour he threw up his situation of assistant, and withdrew to Stanmore, a village a very few miles from Harrow. Here he was followed by forty of the young rebels, and with this stock in trade he proceeded to set up a school on his own account. This, Dr. Johnstone thinks, was the crisis of Parr's life. The die had turned up against him, and the disappointment, with its immediate consequences, gave a complexion to his future fortunes, character, and comfort. He had already mounted a full-bottomed wig when he stood for Harrow, anxious, as it should seem, to give his face a still further chance of keeping its start. He now began to ride on a black saddle, and bore in his hand a long wand with an ivory head, like a crosier in high prelatical pomp. His neighbours, who wondered what it could all mean, had scarcely time to identify him with his pontificals, before they saw him stalking along the street in a dirty, striped dressing-gown. A wife was all that was now wanted to complete the establishment at Stanmore, and accordingly Miss Jane Marsingale, a lady of an ancient Yorkshire family, was provided for him, (Parr, like Hooker, appears to have courted by proxy, and with about the same success,) and so Stanmore was set a going as the rival of Harrow. These were fearful odds, and it came to pass, that in spite of "Attic symposia," and groves of Academus, and the enacting of a Greek play, and the perpetual recitation of the fragment in praise of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, the establishment at Stanmore declined, and at the end of five years, Parr was not sorry to accept the mastership of an endowed school at Colchester. To Colchester, therefore, he removed with his wife and a daughter in the spring of 1777. Here he took priest's orders at the hands of Bishop Lowth, and found society congenial to him in Dr. Foster, a kindred whig, and in Thomas Twining, a kindred scholar.