when the work itself appears, the splendour of the performance will, I hope, amply compensate for the delay of the publication. I am, your constant reader, PHILALETHes.

Parr's Review of Abdollatif is prefaced by the following letter:

I have, without asking your permission, taken a liberty, for which I would readily apologize to you, if I thought of you less highly, or felt for you less warmly than I do. I doubt not but you have read, and with surprise too, and with pain, and it may be with some anger, the close of the Review of your Translation of Abdollatif. On a subject which so nearly touches your personal honour, your literary fame, and it may be your worldy interest, I shrunk from secrecy, as from something not only unfriendly but base. Know then, that I am the writer of that review, and if occasion offers, let others know it. As to me or White, I cannot want defence, for I have spoken with firmness indeed, but I trust with decency, some indisputable but important truths.

The delicacy either of your feelings or your situation may make it necessary for you to explain, and authorized as you are to proclaim me, or, if you please, to give up the writer, that explanation I hope will serve all the purposes of defence. Dear Sir, you know my respect for your patron, as well as my regard for you. You also know my love of letters, endeared as they are to me by a long and laborious course of application. You know; let me add, what is yet dearer to me, my firm and sincere attachment to the Church of England, an attachment, not arising from the honest prejudices of education, or upon any sordid views of interest-but upon a sincere and well founded conviction of its transcendant excellence and solid utility. You will not therefore suspect me of meaning offence to any men or set of men, while I am anxious to do justice to you as a scholar, as a man, as one whom I am happy and proud to rank among my best and dearest friends. Mix discretion with your zeal, do not condescend to mention my name to every inquisitive and impertinent babbler; do not conceal it from any man of sense and virtue, whose judgment is worthy either of your attention or my own.

The review:

And now, gentle reader, we will gratify thy curiosity, for curious thou must be, to know the labours of the writer, and the situation of the man. We will not enter into invidious comparison between Mr. W. who is said to be an idle man, and other Professors of his own University, whose diligence we are ready to admit from candid presumption, till they shall give us a more direct proof from some publications. Suffice it to speak the truth, and the whole truth, of Mr. W. alone. He is well skilled in the French, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Chaldee, Syriac, Persic, and Arabic languages. He is intimately acquainted with the eminent scholars of his own country, for such we suppose Sir William Jones, the late Dr. Hunt, the late Dr. Johnson, Mr. Bryant, Dr. Scott, Dr. Parr, Dr. Adams, and the late Dr. Hunter. He has lived on terms of the closest intimacy, and most cordial friendship, with Dr. Routh, the learned editor of Plato's Dialogues; with Mr. Badcock, the well-known reviewer of Dr. Priestley's Ecclesiastical History; with Mr. Porson, on whom, with Mr. Burgess, the task of supporting and adorning Greek literature in this country has devolved after the death of a Toup, a Musgrave, and a Tyrwhit. He is mentioned with applause by Reiske, the editor of Demosthenes, who was one of the best Arabic as well as Greek scholars of his age. He corresponds with Michaelis of Göttingen, with Schweigæuser of Strasburg, with Villoison of Paris, with Schneider of Tubingen, with Schultens of Leyden, and Bjornstahl of Copenhagen. He has published an inaugural oration in excellent Latin; a Sermon on the Revisal of the English Translation; a Letter to the Bishop of London, on the Septuagint; the Syriac Gospels, in two vols. 4to; the Sermons on the Bampton Lectures. He has also translated this very difficult work of Abdollatif; he wrote the Preface to the Translation of Tamerlane; he corrected the text and the translation; and he is said to be now preparing materials for a history of Egypt, which is to be published by subscription.

So much we have to say for the talents, and attainments, and works of the writer. Upon the virtues of the man we might say much more; but our present business is with his success in

life. By the noble liberality of many worthy individuals, he was extricated from distresses in which he was involved by indiscretion without vice, or the appearance of vice; by generosity of temper, by simplicity of heart, and by ignorance of the world, neither surprising in the academic, nor dishonourable to an ecclesiastic. By regular succession in his College, in which there is little or no preferment, for the space of fifteen years he has received an income of £70 from a fellowship, which he must vacate in two years. By the favour of the University he enjoys £70 per ann. for his Laudian Professorship; and this he will be permitted to enjoy for the rest of his life.

In the truly amiable and truly venerable Archbishop of Canterbury, Mr. White has had the honour of experiencing an adviser, a friend, and a benefactor. Our readers will hear this with pleasure, and yet perhaps they may be tempted with us to ask, Where in this enlightened and Christian country, where in the gratitude or in the wisdom of his contemporaries, where among the luminaries of the Church, or the governors of the State, where are we to look for his patrons? On this subject our readers may be impatient, but we are quite silent. With ourselves, who are only humble reviewers,

βοῦς ἐπὶ γλώσσης μέγας.

Notwithstanding this full conviction of his having received the most important literary assistance, without any acknowledgment of it, and even after the publication of the two pamphlets, White's character was still supported by some persons of great name in the University of Oxford; and the Government thought so highly of his talents, and so little of his detection, that they rewarded him with a Canonry of Christ Church, which Parr had vainly solicited for him in the foregoing memorial, when the Professor's character was without impeachment.

That all men did not participate in those sentiments, which seemed to justify the worst literary

frauds, will appear in the letters of Mr. John Bartlam and of Dr. Gabriel, placed in the Appendix, and which will dilute the gravity of the subject with a portion of the levity and gossip of the day, and the following from the Rev. Dr. Smyth, Master of Pembroke College, Oxford, to Dr. Parr:

DEAR SIR,

Dec. 12th, 1789. Pemb. Coll.

An illness, which has confined me to my room for some days, prevented my answering your obliging letter so soon as I ought to have done. It gives me no small pleasure to find that you sometimes think of me, and recall to my remembrance the many happy and improving hours I spent in my last visit to Hatton. We had then a common friend, whom we both of us loved and respected for talents which, I am afraid, he is found no longer to possess; and for virtues, which reproach us for our credulity, and the unguarded simplicity with which we resigned our affections. Firmly persuaded that all his faults were but the amiable infirmities I had often observed in the train of the greatest virtues, and believing that the harmless levity that accompanied all his actions indicated a mind pure and unsullied, but, at the same time, inattentive to its own consequence: I soon became the dupe of my heart. I loved him from principle; and, notwithstanding some few untoward circumstances that frequently occurred, I forced my understanding to submit. Occasional suspicions, it is true, insinuated themselves from time to time; but I either lulled them to sleep, or banished them as unwelcome and uninvited guests, whom my breast was not made to harbour. Had White been indifferent to me, it is more than probable I should have compared his apparent incapacity with the real and brilliant talents that are displayed in almost every page of his incomparable Sermons; and much weaker evidence than is now produced against their authenticity would have been sufficient to have satisfied me that he could not have wrote them. No arguments, however specious, or however confidently insisted on, would have convinced me that he was equal to composition which required the union

of so many and so great powers of the mind, but such as went directly to prove that he was at one particular period of his life, and at no other, under the immediate influence of inspiration. Had I consulted my reason, as much as I did my affection for him, I should very soon have arrived at a conclusion not very favourable to his pretensions. Here, I might have said, is an instance that puzzles and confounds the powers and abilities of our most intimate acquaintance, without ever betraying by design, in any one solitary moment of his life, the most slender proof of genius or learning; without ever deviating by accident from the line of folly and insipid levity, that marks his conversation into even the humble path of common sense. This extraordinary phænomenon bursts upon us like a comet, whose trackless path the eye pursues with wonder and amazement, not at the magnitude or brilliancy of its orb, but because it knows not from whence it comes, and is ignorant whither it is going. Providence, in the place of genius and industry, so necessary to the attainments of other men, seems to have sent him into the world, furnished and accommodated, like the inferior parts of the animal creation, whom the strong and unerring instincts. of nature conduct, without labour, without education, and almost without effect, to the ultimate point of perfection they are capable of realizing.

It is true, as you observe, he has a strong party in Oxford; but a party, I think, not of much weight, either of talent or authority; whose strong, but unprincipled zeal has hitherto proved fatal both to his moral and literary reputation. They very early took offence at the slow and timid caution with which their hero was retreating from a contest which he very well knew would in the end cover him with shame and remorse. The Professor, whose real pace is a heavy trot, was extremely unwilling to be thus pricked by their indiscretion into a full gallop. Had these kind gentlemen left him to the guidance of his own natural sagacity, he would have given a glorious day, and afforded excellent sport to the hunters of his reputation. He would have beat a long time about the bush, nor would he have quitted a country so dear to him, from a long and intimate acquaintance, till the united cry of horses and hounds pressing close on his brush, and which every gale brings nearer to him, puts him in mind that his course is nearly at an end.