He delivered his justly celebrated Spital Sermon in the accustomed place, Christ-Church, Newgate Street, Easter Tuesday, 1800, before his friend, Harvey Christian Combe, Esq., M.P., the celebrated brewer, then Lord Mayor. “Before the service begun,” says one of his friends, “I went into the vestry, and found Dr. Parr seated, with pipes and tobacco placed before him on the table. He evidently felt the importance of the occasion, but felt, at the same time, a confidence in his own powers. When he ascended the pulpit, a profound silence prevailed. The sermon occupied nearly an hour and a quarter in the delivery; and in allusion to its extreme length, it was remarked by a lady, who had been asked her opinion of it, “enough there is, and more than enough”—the first words of its first sentence,—a bon mot he is said to have received with good humour. As he and the Lord Mayor were coming out of the church, the latter, albeit unused to the facetious mode, “Well,” said Dr. Parr to him, always anxious for well-merited praise, “how did you like the sermon? Let me have the suffrage of your strong and honest understanding.” “Why, Doctor,” returned his lordship, “there were four things in your sermon I did not like to hear.” “State them,” replied Parr, eagerly. “Why, to speak frankly, then,” said Combe, “they were the quarters of the church clock, which struck four times before you had finished it.” “I once saw, lying in the Chapter Coffee-house,” says Dyer, in a letter printed in Parriana, “the Doctor’s Spital Sermon, with a comical caricature of him, in the pulpit, preaching and smoking at the same time, with ex fumo dare lucem issuing from his mouth.”
ANOTHER CLASS OF PREACHERS
At Cambridge, and eke at Oxford, have taken an opposite course, and from their being to be had at all times, have at the former place, obtained the soubriquet “Hack Preachers.” In the Gradus ad Cantabrigiam, they are described as “the common exhibitioners at St. Mary’s, employed in the service of defaulters and absentees. It must be confessed, however,” adds this writer, “that these HACKS are good fast trotters, as they commonly go over the course in twenty minutes, and sometimes less.” Gilbert Wakefield, whom nobody will suspect of forbearance, calls them, in his Memoirs, “a piteous, unedifying tribe.” This, however, can scarcely be applied to the ordinary preachers of the present day, and especial care is taken by the heads of the university that the select preachers (one of whom is named for each month during term-time) do not name substitutes themselves. The following poetic jeu d’esprit, entitled “Lines on three of the appointed Preachers of St. Mary’s, Cambridge, attacking Calvin” were no others than the three eminent living divines, Dr. Butler, Dr. Maltby, Bishop of Chichester, and Dr. Herbert Marsh, Bishop of Peterborough:—
“Three Preachers, in three distant counties born,
The Church of England’s doctrines do adorn:
Harsh Calvin’s mystic tenets were their mark,
Founded in texts perverted, gloomy, dark.
Butler in clearness and in force surpassed,
Maltby with sweetness spoke of ages past;
Whilst Marsh himself, who scarce could further go,
With Criticism’s fetters bound the foe.”
This punning morsel, of some standing in the university, is scarce surpassed by Hood himself:—
THE THREE-HEADED PRIEST.
Old Doctor Delve, a scribbling quiz,
Afraid of critics’ jibes,
By turns assumes the various phiz
Of three old classic scribes.
Though now with high erected head,
And lordly strut he’ll go by us,
He once made lawyers’ robes, ’tis said,
And called himself Mac-robius.
Last night I asked the man to sup,
Who showed a second alias;
He gobbled all my jellies up,
O greedy Aulus Gellius.
On Sunday, arrogant and proud,
He purrs like any tom-puss,
And reads the Word of God so loud,
He must be Theo-pompus.