uld 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 pontifi