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.
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