Part 37

Of the hundred and one epigrams, the story goes—that when Pitt and Dundas appeared before the House, Pitt tried to speak, but showing himself unable, was kindly pulled down into his seat by those about him; Dundas who was equally unfitted for eloquence, had sense enough to sit silent. Perry, of the Morning Chronicle, witnessed the scene, and on his return from the House, gave a description of it to Porson, who, being vastly amused, called for pen and ink, and musing over his pipe and tankard, produced the one hundred and one pieces of verse before the day dawned. The point of most of them lies in puns. The first epigram is:

"That Ça Ira in England will prevail, All sober men deny with heart and hand; To talk of going sure's a pretty tale, When e'en our rulers can't as much as stand."

The following are better:—

"Your gentle brains with full libations drench, You've then Pitt's title to the Treasury Bench. Your foe in war to overrate A maxim is of ancient date; Then sure 'twas right, in time of trouble, That our good rulers should see double. The mob are beasts! exclaims the King of Daggers; What creature's he that's troubled with the staggers?"

"When Billy found he scarce could stand, 'Help! help!' he cried, and stretched his hand To faithful Harry calling, Quoth Hal, 'My friend, I'm sorry for't; 'Tis not my practice to support A minister that's falling.'"

"'Who's up?' inquired Burke of a friend at the door; 'Oh! no one,' says Paddy, 'though Pitt's on the floor.'"

Porson was not imposed upon for a moment by the Ireland forgeries of Shakspeare, and when asked to set his name to a declaration of belief in their genuineness, replied, with a smile, that he was "slow to subscribe articles of faith." Scholars, however, owe a debt of gratitude to Ireland, of which, perhaps, they are seldom conscious; for it was the alleged discovery of Shakspearian plays that drew from Porson one of the cleverest specimens of his peculiar powers that remain to us. We mean the translation of "Three Children sliding on the Ice," which he sent to the Morning Chronicle, as a fragment of Sophocles, recently discovered by a friend of his at the bottom of an old trunk.

Porson had high animal spirits; and he is said once, for a wager, to have carried a young lady round the room in his teeth. His conversation, however, after a certain period of the evening, was not always fit for ladies. Rogers once took him to a party, where several women of fashion were present, who were anxious to hear him talk. The Professor, who hated being made a lion, selected for his theme the soup of Vauxhall, and at last, we are told, talked so oddly, that all the women retreated except the famous Lady Crewe, who was not to be frightened by any man. "After this," says Rogers, "I brought him home as far as Piccadilly, where I am sorry to say I left him sick in the middle of the street."

At those houses where Porson was on intimate terms, it was understood that he was always to go away at eleven. Porson accepted the arrangement in perfect good faith, and invariably required that it should be carried out to the letter; for, "though he never attempted to exceed the hour limited, he would never stir before," and he warmly resented any attempt to make him. At one house only was his time extended to twelve; this was Bennet Langton's. There were, of course, houses in which the Professor, so to speak, took the bit between his teeth, and did exactly as he pleased. Horne Tooke's was one of these, as the following story illustrates. Tooke once asked Porson to dine with him in Richmond Buildings; and, as he knew that the Professor had not been in bed for the three preceding nights, he expected to get rid of him at an early hour. He, however, kept Tooke up the whole night; and, in the morning, the latter, in perfect despair, said, "Mr. Porson, I am engaged to meet a friend at breakfast at a coffee-house in Leicester Square." "Oh," replied Porson, "I will go with you;" and he accordingly did so. Soon after they had reached the coffee-house, Tooke contrived to slip out, and running home, ordered his servant not to let Mr. Porson in even if he should attempt to batter down the door. "A man," observed Tooke, "who could sit up four nights successively, could sit up forty."

As soon as Porson had been "turned out of doors like a dog," which was his favourite expression when he received the slightest hint to move, even if it was one o'clock in the morning, he used generally to adjourn to the Cider Cellar, where he was completely king of his company. "Dick," said one of these companions, "can beat us all; he can drink all night, and spout all day." From the Cider Cellar he got home as he could to Essex Court, where he had chambers over the late Mr. Baron Gurney, whose slumbers were a good deal disturbed by the habits of his learned neighbour. On one occasion he was awakened by a tremendous thump upon the floor overhead. Porson, it turned out, had come home drunk, and had tumbled down in his room, and put out his candle; for Gurney soon after heard him fumbling at the staircase lamp, and cursing the nature of things, which made him see two flames instead of one.

The most remarkable feature in Porson's love of liquor was, that he could drink anything. Port wine, indeed, was his favourite beverage. But, in default of this, he would take whatever he could lay his hands on. He was known to swallow a bottle of spirits of wine, an embrocation, and when nothing better was forthcoming, he would even drench himself with water. He would sometimes take part in a contest of drinking; and once, having threatened after dinner to "kick and cuff" his host, Horne Tooke, the latter proposed to settle the affair by drinking, the weapons to be quarts of brandy. When the second bottle was half finished, Porson fell under the table. The conqueror drank another glass to the speedy recovery of his antagonist, and having given instructions to his servants to take great care of the Professor, walked upstairs to tea, as if nothing had occurred. Tooke, however, feared Porson in conversation, because he would often remain silent for a long time, and then "pounce upon him with his terrible memory." In 1798, Parr writes to Dr. Burney, who had recommended that Porson's opinion should be taken on some classical question, "Porson shall do it, and he will do it. I know his terms when he bargains with me: two bottles instead of one, six pipes instead of two, Burgundy instead of claret, liberty to sit till five in the morning instead of sneaking into bed at one; these are his terms."

Porson was very odd in his eating. At breakfast, he frequently ate bread and cheese: and he then took his porter as copiously as Johnson took his tea. At Eton, he once kept Mrs. Goodall at the breakfast-table during the whole of Sunday morning; and when Dr. Goodall returned from church, he found the sixth pot of porter being just carried into his house. In his eating, Porson was very easily satisfied. "He went once," says Mr. Watson, "to the Bodleian to collate a manuscript, and, as the work would occupy him several days, Routh, the president of Magdalen, who was leaving home for the long vacation, said to him at his departure, 'Make my house your home, Mr. Porson, during my absence, for my servants have orders to be quite at your command, and to procure you whatever you please.' When he returned, he asked for the account of what the Professor had had during his stay. The servant brought the bill, and the Doctor, glancing at it, observed a fowl entered in it every day. 'What,' said he, 'did you provide for Mr. Porson no better than this, but oblige him to dine every day on fowl?' 'No, sir,' replied the servant; 'but we asked the gentleman the first day what he would have for dinner, and as he did not seem to know very well what to order, we suggested a fowl. When we went to him about dinner any day afterwards, he always said, "The same as yesterday:" and this was the only answer we could get from him.'"

Sometimes, in a fit of abstraction, he would go without a dinner. One day, when Rogers asked him to stay and dine, he replied, "Thank you, no; I dined yesterday."

Porson used to relate, with much glee, his school anecdotes, the tricks he used to play upon his master and schoolfellows, and the little dramatic pieces which he wrote for private representation. In describing his narrow means, he used to say, "I was almost then destitute in the wide world, with less than 40l. a year for my support, and without a profession; for I could never bring myself to subscribe Articles of Faith. I used often to lie awake for a whole night, and wish for a large pearl." He seemed to delight in company of low grade. At Cambridge, after sitting five hours, and drinking two bottles of sherry, he began to clip the king's English, to cry like a child at the close of his periods; and, in other respects, to show marks of extreme debility. At length, he rose from his chair, staggered to the door, and made his way downstairs without taking the slightest notice of his companion. Subsequently he went out upon a search for the Greek Professor, whom he discovered near the outskirts of Cambridge, leaning upon the arm of a dirty bargeman, and amusing him by the most humorous and laughable anecdotes.

However, Porson could place a strong restraint upon himself when necessary. When he went to stay with his sisters, in the year 1804, it is said that he only took two glasses of wine a day for eleven weeks.

Porson was a man of ready wit and repartee. When asked by a Scotch stranger at the Gray's Inn Coffee-house if Bentley were not a Scotchman, he replied, "No, sir, Bentley was a Greek scholar." He said Bishop Pearson would have been a first-rate critic if he hadn't muddled his brains with divinity. Dr. Parr once asked him, in his pompous manner, before a large company, what he thought about the introduction of moral and physical evil into the world. "Why, Doctor," said Porson, "I think we should have done very well without them."

On his academic visits to the Continent, Porson wrote:—

"I went to Frankfort, and got drunk With that most learn'd Professor Brunck: I went to Worts, and got more drunken, With that more learn'd Professor Runcken."

Porson said one night, when he was very drunk, to Dodd, who was pressing him hard in argument, "Jemmy Dodd, I always despised you when sober, and I'll be d—d if I'll argue with you now that I am drunk."

Porson, in a social party, offered to make a rhyme on anything, when some one suggested one of the Latin gerunds, and he immediately replied:—

"When Dido found Æneas would not come, She mourned in silence, and was Di-do-dum."

A gentleman said to the great "Grecian," with whom he had been disputing—"Dr. Porson, my opinion of you is most contemptible." "Sir," returned the Doctor, "I never knew an opinion of yours that was not contemptible."

Gillies, the historian of Greece, and Porson used now and then to meet. The consequence was certain to be a literary contest. Porson was much the deeper scholar of the two. Gillies was one day speaking to him of the Greek tragedies, and of Pindar's odes. "We know nothing," said Gillies, emphatically, "of the Greek metres." Porson answered, "If, Doctor, you will put your observation in the singular number, I believe it will be very accurate."

Porson being once at a dinner-party where the conversation turned upon Captain Cook, and his celebrated voyages round the world, an ignorant person, in order to contribute his mite towards the social intercourse, asked him, "Pray, was Cook killed on his first voyage?" "I believe he was," answered Porson, "though he did not mind it much, but immediately entered on a second."

Porson said of a prospect shown to him, that it put him in mind of a fellowship—a long, dreary walk, with a church at the end of it. He used to say of Wakefield and Hermann, two critics, who had attacked him, but whose scholarship he held in great contempt, that "whatever he wrote in future should be written in such a manner that they should not reach it with their paws, though they stood on their hind-legs to get at it."

It has been well said that all opportunities of earning honourably pudding and praise availed Porson nothing. "Two Mordecais sat at his gate—thirst and procrastination."

Irony was Porson's chief weapon, though he could be sarcastic enough when he chose; as when he said of Tomline, Bishop of Lincoln, to whom a rich man, who had only seen him once, had left a large legacy, "If he had seen him twice he would have got nothing."

Nor was he more eulogistic of Bishop Porteus, whom he used to call Bishop Proteus, from his having changed his opinions from liberal to illiberal.

Porson made several visits to the British Museum to read and consider the Rosetta stone, whence he got from the officials the sobriquet of Judge Blackstone.

It is sufficiently notorious that Porson was not remarkably attentive to the decoration of his person: indeed, he was at times disagreeably negligent. On one occasion he went to visit a learned friend, afterwards a judge, where a gentleman who did not know Porson, was waiting in anxious and impatient expectation of the barber. On Porson's entering the library, where the gentleman was sitting, he started up and hastily said to him, "Are you the barber?" "No, sir," replied Porson; "but I am a cunning shaver, much at your service."

Porson, when a young man, was eminently handsome, and nearly six feet in height; but he cultivated these natural gifts very little, and was seldom dressed to advantage. William Bankes once invited Porson to dine with him at an hotel at the west-end of the town; but the dinner passed away without the guest making his appearance. Afterwards, on Bankes's asking him why he had not kept his engagement Porson replied (without entering into further particulars), that he "had come;" and Bankes could only conjecture that the waiters, seeing Porson's shabby dress, and not knowing who he was, had offered him some insult, which made him indignantly return home.

Late in life, Porson seems to have become a sad spectacle. "I saw him once at the London Institution," says a writer in the New Monthly Magazine, "with a large patch of coarse brown paper on his nose, the skirts of his rusty black coat hung with cobwebs, and talking in a tone of suavity approaching to condescension to one of the managers." His face was described by an old acquaintance, who met him in 1807, as "fiery and volcanic; his nose, on which he had a perpetual efflorescence, was covered with black patches; his clothes were shabby, his linen dirty."

Porson had a great contempt for physic and physicians, yet, curiously enough, many of his most intimate friends were physicians. In a letter written in 1802 to Dr. Davy, he says: "I have been at Death's door, but by a due neglect of the faculty, and plentiful use of my old remedy (powder of post), I am pretty well recovered."

In the good old days of coach travelling, an inside was occupied by Porson, a young Oxonian, and two ladies. The Oxonian, fresh from college, was amusing the ladies with a variety of talk, and amongst other things, with a quotation from Sophocles. A Greek quotation, and in a coach too, roused the slumbering Professor; and thereupon, waking from a kind of dog sleep, in a snug corner of the vehicle; shaking his ears, and rubbing his eyes, "I think young gentleman," said he, "you favoured us just now with a quotation from Sophocles; I do not happen to recollect it there." "Oh, sir," replied the Oxonian, "the quotation is word for word as I have repeated it, and in Sophocles too; but I suspect, sir, it is some time since you were at college." The Professor applying his hand to his great-coat, and taking out a small pocket edition of Sophocles, quietly asked him if he could be kind enough to show him the passage in question, in that little book. After rummaging the pages for some time, he replied, "Upon second thoughts, I now recollect that the passage is in Euripides." "Then perhaps, sir," said the Professor, putting his hand again into his pocket, and handing him a similar edition of Euripides, "you will be so good as to find it for me, in that little book." The young Oxonian returned again to his task, but with no better success, muttering however to himself, "Curse me if ever I quote Greek again in a coach." The tittering of the ladies informed him that he was got into a hobble. At last, "Bless me, sir," said he, "how dull I am: I recollect now—yes, yes, I perfectly remember that the passage is in Æschylus." When our astonished freshman vociferated, "Stop the coach—halloah, coachman, let me out, I say, instantly—let me out! there's a fellow here has got the Bodleian library in his pocket; let me out, I say—let me out; he must be Porson or the devil!"

He sometimes put the Greek folio of Galen, the physician, under his pillow at night; not, as he used to observe, because he expected medicinal virtue from it, but because his asthma required that his head should be kept high.

Parriana: Oddities of Dr. Parr.

In his boyhood, Parr is described, by his sister as studious after his kind, delighting in "Mother Goose and the Seven Champions," and not partaking much in the sports usual at such an age. He had had a very early inclination for the Church, and the elements of that taste for ecclesiastical pomp which distinguished him in after-life, appeared when he was not more than nine or ten years old. He would put on one of his father's shirts for a surplice; he would then read the Church Service to his sister and cousins, after they had been duly summoned by a bell tied to the banisters; preach them a sermon, which his congregation was apt to think, in those days, somewhat of the longest; and, even in spite of his father's remonstrances, would bury a bird or a kitten (Parr had always a great fondness for animals) with the rites of Christian burial.

Samuel was his mother's darling; she indulged all his whims, consulted his appetite, provided hot suppers for him almost from his cradle. He was her only son, and was at this time very fair and well-favoured. Providence, however, seeing that at all events vanity was to be a large ingredient in Parr's composition, sent him, in its mercy, a fit of smallpox; and with the same intent, perhaps, deprived him of a parent who was killing her son's character by kindness. Parr never was a boy, says one of his friends and schoolfellows. When he was about nine years old, he was seen sitting on the churchyard-gate at Harrow, whilst his schoolfellows were all at play. "Sam, why don't you play with the others?" cried one. "Do not you know, sir," said Parr, with vast solemnity, "that I am to be a parson?" And Parr himself used to tell of Sir William Jones, another of his schoolfellows, that, as they were one day walking together near Harrow, Jones suddenly stopped short, and looking hard at him, cried out, "Parr, if you should have the good luck to live forty years, you may stand a chance of overtaking your face." Between Dr. Bennet, Parr, and Jones, the closest intimacy was formed: the three challenged one another to trials of skill in the imitation of popular authors—they wrote and acted a play together—they got up mock councils, and harangues, and combats, after the manner of the classical heroes of antiquity, and under their names—till, at the age of fourteen, Parr being now at the head of the school, was removed from it, and placed in the shop of his father, who was a surgeon and apothecary. The Doctor must have found, in the course of his practice, that there are some pills which will not go down—and this was one. Parr began to criticize the Latin of his father's prescriptions, instead of "making the mixture." Accordingly, having tried in vain to reconcile himself to the "uttering of mortal drugs" for three years, he was sent to Cambridge, and admitted of Emmanuel College, where Dr. Farmer was tutor. Of this proficient in black-letter we are told by Archdeacon Butler, that Farmer was a man of such singular indolence as to neglect sending in the young men's accounts, and is supposed to have burnt large sums of money by putting into the fire unopened letters, which contained remittances.