Parr, SAMUEL, a once notable scholar, was born the son of a surgeon at Harrow-on-the-Hill, January 15, 1747. He attended Harrow School, and, after being found unfit for apprenticeship to his father's profession, was sent to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1765. Two years later his father's death obliged him to leave Cambridge and accept an assistant-mastership at Harrow. Here he remained nearly five years, but, disappointed of the head-mastership on Dr Summer's death (1771), started an independent school at Stanmore, and kept it going five years. He was head-master of Colchester grammar-school (1776-78) and of Norwich (1778-86). His clerical preferences were the rectory of Asterby in Lincolnshire, the vicarage of Hatton near Warwick, and a prebendal stall in St Paul's Cathedral. He spent almost the half of his life at Hatton, and here he died, March 6, 1825. The degree of LL.D. was given him by Cambridge in 1781. In 1787 he published an edition of Bellenden, to which he prefixed his celebrated preface, which is as remarkable for its uncompromising advocacy of Whig principles as for the scrupulous Ciceronianism of its Latinity.
It is almost impossible to understand the reputation which Dr Parr once had. None of his voluminous writings justify it. That he was in some respects an accomplished scholar is undoubted, for he could write Latin of Ciceronian purity and finish; but it is equally undoubted that he never did anything with his boasted scholarship, and has left the world absolutely nothing to keep him in remembrance. Yet his complete works (edited by Dr J. Johnstone in 1828) form eight enormous tomes, and contain 5734 octavo pages, many of them printed in small type. They relate to matters historical, critical, and metaphysical, but in all 'the thread of Parr's veracity is finer than the staple of his argument.' To his conversational powers alone he owed the fame that he enjoyed during his life. He was an amazing, an overwhelming talker. Bold, dogmatic, arrogant, with a memory profoundly and minutely retentive, and with a genuine gift of ephemeral epigram, he seemed, at the tables of statesmen, and wits, and divines, to be a man of tremendous talent, capable of any literary feat; but the learning and the repartee have left little trace of their existence, and posterity declines to admire the wonders that it has neither seen nor heard.
See E. H. Barker's ill-arranged Parriana (2 vols. 1828-29), De Quincey's essay, and the Lives by Field (1828) and Johnstone (1828).