Part 34

At those houses where Porson was on intimate terms, it was understood that he was always to go away at eleven. Porson accepted the arrangement in perfect good faith, and invariably required that it should be carried out to the letter; for, "though he never attempted to exceed the hour limited, he would never stir before," and he warmly resented any attempt to make him. At one house only was his time extended to twelve; this was Bennet Langton's. There were, of course, houses in which the Professor, so to speak, took the bit between his teeth, and did exactly as he pleased. Horne Tooke's was one of these, as the following story illustrates. Tooke once asked Porson to dine with him in Richmond Buildings; and, as he knew that the Professor _had not been in bed for the three preceding nights_, he expected to get rid of him at an early hour. He, however, kept Tooke up the whole night; and, in the morning, the latter, in perfect despair, said, "Mr. Porson, I am engaged to meet a friend at breakfast at a coffee-house in Leicester Square." "Oh," replied Porson, "I will go with you;" and he accordingly did so. Soon after they had reached the coffee-house, Tooke contrived to slip out, and running home, ordered his servant not to let Mr. Porson in even if he should attempt to batter down the door. "A man," observed Tooke, "who could sit up four nights successively, could sit up forty."

As soon as Porson had been "turned out of doors like a dog," which was his favourite expression when he received the slightest hint to move, even if it was one o'clock in the morning, he used generally to adjourn to the Cider Cellar, where he was completely king of his company. "Dick," said one of these companions, "can beat us all; he can drink all night, and spout all day." From the Cider Cellar he got home as he could to Essex Court, where he had chambers over the late Mr. Baron Gurney, whose slumbers were a good deal disturbed by the habits of his learned neighbour. On one occasion he was awakened by a tremendous thump upon the floor overhead. Porson, it turned out, had come home drunk, and had tumbled down in his room, and put out his candle; for Gurney soon after heard him fumbling at the staircase lamp, and cursing the nature of things, which made him see two flames instead of one.

The most remarkable feature in Porson's love of liquor was, that he could drink anything. Port wine, indeed, was his favourite beverage. But, in default of this, he would take whatever he could lay his hands on. He was known to swallow a bottle of spirits of wine, an embrocation, and when nothing better was forthcoming, he would even drench himself with water. He would sometimes take part in a contest of drinking; and once, having threatened after dinner to "kick and cuff" his host, Horne Tooke, the latter proposed to settle the affair by drinking, the weapons to be quarts of brandy. When the second bottle was half finished, Porson fell under the table. The conqueror drank another glass to the speedy recovery of his antagonist, and having given instructions to his servants to take great care of the Professor, walked upstairs to tea, as if nothing had occurred. Tooke, however, feared Porson in conversation, because he would often remain silent for a long time, and then "pounce upon him with his terrible memory." In 1798, Parr writes to Dr. Burney, who had recommended that Porson's opinion should be taken on some classical question, "Porson shall do it, and he will do it. I know his terms when he bargains with me: two bottles instead of one, six pipes instead of two, Burgundy instead of claret, liberty to sit till five in the morning instead of sneaking into bed at one; these are his terms."

Porson was very odd in his eating. At breakfast, he frequently ate bread and cheese: and he then took his porter as copiously as Johnson took his tea. At Eton, he once kept Mrs. Goodall at the breakfast-table during the whole of Sunday morning; and when Dr. Goodall returned from church, he found the sixth pot of porter being just carried into his house. In his eating, Porson was very easily satisfied. "He went once," says Mr. Watson, "to the Bodleian to collate a manuscript, and, as the work would occupy him several days, Routh, the president of Magdalen, who was leaving home for the long vacation, said to him at his departure, 'Make my house your home, Mr. Porson, during my absence, for my servants have orders to be quite at your command, and to procure you whatever you please.' When he returned, he asked for the account of what the Professor had had during his stay. The servant brought the bill, and the Doctor, glancing at it, observed a fowl entered in it every day. 'What,' said he, 'did you provide for Mr. Porson no better than this, but oblige him to dine every day on fowl?' 'No, sir,' replied the servant; 'but we asked the gentleman the first day what he would have for dinner, and as he did not seem to know very well what to order, we suggested a fowl. When we went to him about dinner any day afterwards, he always said, "The same as yesterday:" and this was the only answer we could get from him.'"

Sometimes, in a fit of abstraction, he would go without a dinner. One day, when Rogers asked him to stay and dine, he replied, "Thank you, no; I dined yesterday."

Porson used to relate, with much glee, his school anecdotes, the tricks he used to play upon his master and schoolfellows, and the little dramatic pieces which he wrote for private representation. In describing his narrow means, he used to say, "I was almost then destitute in the wide world, with less than 40_l._ a year for my support, and without a profession; for I could never bring myself to subscribe Articles of Faith. I used often to lie awake for a whole night, and wish for a large pearl." He seemed to delight in company of low grade. At Cambridge, after sitting five hours, and drinking two bottles of sherry, he began to clip the king's English, to cry like a child at the close of his periods; and, in other respects, to show marks of extreme debility. At length, he rose from his chair, staggered to the door, and made his way downstairs without taking the slightest notice of his companion. Subsequently he went out upon a search for the Greek Professor, whom he discovered near the outskirts of Cambridge, leaning upon the arm of a dirty bargeman, and amusing him by the most humorous and laughable anecdotes.

However, Porson could place a strong restraint upon himself when necessary. When he went to stay with his sisters, in the year 1804, it is said that he only took two glasses of wine a day for eleven weeks.

Porson was a man of ready wit and repartee. When asked by a Scotch stranger at the Gray's Inn Coffee-house if Bentley were not a Scotchman, he replied, "No, sir, Bentley was a Greek scholar." He said Bishop Pearson would have been a first-rate critic if he hadn't muddled his brains with divinity. Dr. Parr once asked him, in his pompous manner, before a large company, what he thought about the introduction of moral and physical evil into the world. "Why, Doctor," said Porson, "I think we should have done very well without them."

On his academic visits to the Continent, Porson wrote:--

"I went to Frankfort, and got drunk With that most learn'd Professor Brunck: I went to Worts, and got more drunken, With that more learn'd Professor Runcken."

Porson said one night, when he was very drunk, to Dodd, who was pressing him hard in argument, "Jemmy Dodd, I always despised you when sober, and I'll be d----d if I'll argue with you now that I am drunk."

Porson, in a social party, offered to make a rhyme on anything, when some one suggested one of the Latin gerunds, and he immediately replied:--

"When Dido found Æneas would not come, She mourned in silence, and was _Di-do-dum_."

A gentleman said to the great "Grecian," with whom he had been disputing--"Dr. Porson, my opinion of you is most contemptible." "Sir," returned the Doctor, "I never knew an opinion of yours that was not contemptible."

Gillies, the historian of Greece, and Porson used now and then to meet. The consequence was certain to be a literary contest. Porson was much the deeper scholar of the two. Gillies was one day speaking to him of the Greek tragedies, and of Pindar's odes. "_We know nothing_," said Gillies, emphatically, "of the Greek metres." Porson answered, "If, Doctor, you will put your observation in the _singular_ number, I believe it will be very accurate."

Porson being once at a dinner-party where the conversation turned upon Captain Cook, and his celebrated voyages round the world, an ignorant person, in order to contribute his mite towards the social intercourse, asked him, "Pray, was Cook killed on his first voyage?" "I believe he was," answered Porson, "though he did not mind it much, but immediately entered on a second."

Porson said of a prospect shown to him, that it put him in mind of a fellowship--a long, dreary walk, with a church at the end of it. He used to say of Wakefield and Hermann, two critics, who had attacked him, but whose scholarship he held in great contempt, that "whatever he wrote in future should be written in such a manner that they should not reach it with their paws, though they stood on their hind-legs to get at it."

It has been well said that all opportunities of earning honourably pudding and praise availed Porson nothing. "Two Mordecais sat at his gate--thirst and procrastination."

Irony was Porson's chief weapon, though he could be sarcastic enough when he chose; as when he said of Tomline, Bishop of Lincoln, to whom a rich man, who had only seen him once, had left a large legacy, "If he had seen him twice he would have got nothing."

Nor was he more eulogistic of Bishop Porteus, whom he used to call Bishop _Proteus_, from his having changed his opinions from liberal to illiberal.

Porson made several visits to the British Museum to read and consider the Rosetta stone, whence he got from the officials the _sobriquet_ of Judge Blackstone.

It is sufficiently notorious that Porson was not remarkably attentive to the decoration of his person: indeed, he was at times disagreeably negligent. On one occasion he went to visit a learned friend, afterwards a judge, where a gentleman who did not know Porson, was waiting in anxious and impatient expectation of the barber. On Porson's entering the library, where the gentleman was sitting, he started up and hastily said to him, "Are you the barber?" "No, sir," replied Porson; "but I am a cunning shaver, much at your service."

Porson, when a young man, was eminently handsome, and nearly six feet in height; but he cultivated these natural gifts very little, and was seldom dressed to advantage. William Bankes once invited Porson to dine with him at an hotel at the west-end of the town; but the dinner passed away without the guest making his appearance. Afterwards, on Bankes's asking him why he had not kept his engagement Porson replied (without entering into further particulars), that he "had come;" and Bankes could only conjecture that the waiters, seeing Porson's shabby dress, and not knowing who he was, had offered him some insult, which made him indignantly return home.

Late in life, Porson seems to have become a sad spectacle. "I saw him once at the London Institution," says a writer in the _New Monthly Magazine_, "with a large patch of coarse brown paper on his nose, the skirts of his rusty black coat hung with cobwebs, and talking in a tone of suavity approaching to condescension to one of the managers." His face was described by an old acquaintance, who met him in 1807, as "fiery and volcanic; his nose, on which he had a perpetual efflorescence, was covered with black patches; his clothes were shabby, his linen dirty."

Porson had a great contempt for physic and physicians, yet, curiously enough, many of his most intimate friends were physicians. In a letter written in 1802 to Dr. Davy, he says: "I have been at Death's door, but by a due neglect of the faculty, and plentiful use of my old remedy (powder of post), I am pretty well recovered."

In the good old days of coach travelling, an inside was occupied by Porson, a young Oxonian, and two ladies. The Oxonian, fresh from college, was amusing the ladies with a variety of talk, and amongst other things, with a quotation from Sophocles. A Greek quotation, and in a coach too, roused the slumbering Professor; and thereupon, waking from a kind of dog sleep, in a snug corner of the vehicle; shaking his ears, and rubbing his eyes, "I think young gentleman," said he, "you favoured us just now with a quotation from Sophocles; I do not happen to recollect it there." "Oh, sir," replied the Oxonian, "the quotation is word for word as I have repeated it, and in Sophocles too; but I suspect, sir, it is some time since you were at college." The Professor applying his hand to his great-coat, and taking out a small pocket edition of Sophocles, quietly asked him if he could be kind enough to show him the passage in question, in that little book. After rummaging the pages for some time, he replied, "Upon second thoughts, I now recollect that the passage is in Euripides." "Then perhaps, sir," said the Professor, putting his hand again into his pocket, and handing him a similar edition of Euripides, "you will be so good as to find it for me, in that little book." The young Oxonian returned again to his task, but with no better success, muttering however to himself, "Curse me if ever I quote Greek again in a coach." The tittering of the ladies informed him that he was got into a hobble. At last, "Bless me, sir," said he, "how dull I am: I recollect now--yes, yes, I perfectly remember that the passage is in Æschylus." When our astonished freshman vociferated, "Stop the coach--halloah, coachman, let me out, I say, instantly--let me out! there's a fellow here has got the Bodleian library in his pocket; let me out, I say--let me out; he must be Porson or the devil!"

He sometimes put the Greek folio of Galen, the physician, under his pillow at night; not, as he used to observe, because he expected medicinal virtue from it, but because his asthma required that his head should be kept high.

Parriana: Oddities of Dr. Parr.

In his boyhood, Parr is described, by his sister as studious after his kind, delighting in "Mother Goose and the Seven Champions," and not partaking much in the sports usual at such an age. He had 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; 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, 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, seeing that at all events vanity was to be a large ingredient in Parr's composition, sent him, in its mercy, a fit of smallpox; 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 one of his friends and schoolfellows. When he was about nine years old, he was seen sitting on the churchyard-gate at Harrow, whilst his schoolfellows were all at play. "Sam, why don't you play with the others?" cried one. "Do not you know, sir," said Parr, with vast solemnity, "that I am to be a parson?" And Parr himself used to tell of Sir William Jones, another of his schoolfellows, 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 Dr. Bennet, Parr, and Jones, the closest intimacy was formed: the 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 the shop of his father, who was a surgeon and apothecary. 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." Accordingly, having tried in vain to reconcile himself to the "uttering of mortal drugs" for three years, he was sent to Cambridge, and admitted of Emmanuel College, where Dr. Farmer was tutor. Of this proficient in black-letter we are told by Archdeacon Butler, that Farmer 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.

In 1791, when in his twenty-fifth year, Parr became a candidate for the head-mastership of Harrow, though he was beaten by Dr. B. Heath. A rebellion ensued among the boys, many of whom took Parr's part; and he threw up his situation of assistant, and withdrew to Stanmore. 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 is thought to have been the crisis of Parr's life. The die had turned 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, appearing to have courted by proxy, and with about the same success. Thus Stanmore was set agoing as the rival of Harrow. These were fearful odds, and it came to pass that, in spite of "Attic Symposia," and grooves 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 mentorship of an endowed school at Colchester.

Parr was evidently fond of living in troubled waters: accordingly, on his removal to Colchester, he got into a quarrel with the trustees of the school on the subject of a lease; and he printed a pamphlet about it, which was so violent that he never published it, probably influenced by his prospect of succeeding to Norwich School. This occasioned Dr. Foster to remark, "That Norwich might be touched by a fellow-feeling for Colchester; and the crape-makers of the one place sympathize with the bag-makers of the other." The pamphlet was withheld, and Parr was elected to the school at Norwich. The preferment which he gained was the living of Asterby, which he exchanged for the perpetual curacy of Hatton, in Warwickshire. Neither was of much value. Lord Dartmouth, whose sons had been under Parr's care, endeavoured to procure something for him from Lord Thurlow, but the Chancellor is reported to have said "No," with an oath. The great and good Bishop Lowth, however, at the request of the same nobleman, gave Parr a prebend in St. Paul's, which, though a trifle at the time, eventually became, at the expiration of leases, a source of affluence to Parr in his old age. How far he was from such a condition at this period of his life, is seen by an incident related by Mr. Field. The Doctor was one day in that gentleman's library, when his eye was caught by the title of Stephens's Greek Thesaurus. Suddenly turning about, he said to Field, vehemently, "Ah! my friend, my friend, may you never be forced, as I was at Norwich, to sell that work, to me so precious, from absolute and urgent necessity."

Dr. Parr and Dr. Johnson once had a sort of stand-up fight at argument. After the interview was over, Johnson said, "I do not know when I have had an occasion of such free controversy. It is remarkable how much of a man's life may pass without meeting with any instance of this kind of open discussion." Here is Dr. Parr's account of the meeting: "I remember the interview well. I gave him no quarter. The subject of our dispute was the liberty of the press. Dr. Johnson was very great; whilst he was arguing, I observed that he stamped. Upon this I stamped. Dr. Johnson said, 'Why did you stamp, Dr. Parr?' I replied, 'Sir, because _you_ stamped; and I was resolved not to give you the advantage of a _stamp_ in the argument.'" It is impossible to do justice to this description of the scene. The vehemence, the characteristic pomposity with which it was accompanied, may easily be imagined by those who knew him, but cannot be adequately represented to those who did not.

In the party was Dr. ----, an Arian minister, and Mr. ----, a Socinian minister. One of the party seeing Parr was on friendly terms with the above gentlemen, said, "I suppose, sir, although they are heretics, you think it is possible they may be saved?" "Yes, sir," said he, adding with affected vehemence, "but they must be _scorched_ first." Parr talked of economy; he thought that a man's happiness was secure, in proportion to the small number of his wants, and said that all his lifetime it had been his object to prevent the multiplication of them in himself. Some one said to him, "Then, sir, your secret of happiness is to _cut down_ your wants." _Parr._ "No, sir, _my_ secret is, _not to let them grow_."

The doctor used, on a Sunday evening, after church, to sit on the green at Hatton, with his pipe and his jug, and witness the exertions of his parishioners in the truly English game of cricket, making only one proviso, that none should join the party who had not previously been to church. It is needless to say his presence was an effectual check on all disorderly conduct. The skittle-grounds were deserted, and a better conducted parish was rarely seen than the worthy Doctor's.

Dr. Parr was one of the enthusiastic admirers of Shakspeare, who fell upon their knees before Ireland's MSS., and by their idolatry inspired hundreds of others. Still, Parr attempts to explain this in a note to the catalogue of his library at Hatton, as follows:--"Ireland's (Samuel) Great and Impudent Forgery, called 'Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments, under the hand and seal of William Shakspeare,' folio, 1796. I am almost ashamed to insert this worthless and infamously trickish book. It is said to include the tragedy of _King Lear_, and a fragment of _Hamlet_. Ireland told a lie when he imputed to me the words which _Joseph Warton_ used, the very morning I called on Ireland, and was inclined to admit the possibility of genuineness in his papers. In my subsequent conversation I told him my change of opinion. But I thought it not worth while to dispute in print with a detected impostor.--S. P."