Parr's hand was ever open as day. Poverty had vexed, but had never contracted his spirit; money he despised, except as it gave him power--power to ride in his state-coach, to throw wide his doors to hospitality, to load his table with plate and his shelves with learning; power to adorn his church with chandeliers and painted windows; to make glad the cottages of his poor; to grant a loan to a tottering farmer; to rescue from want a forlorn patriot or a thriftless scholar. Whether misfortune, or mismanagement, or folly, or vice, had brought its victim low, his want was a passport to Parr's pity, and the dew of his bounty fell alike upon the bad and the good, upon the just and the unjust. It is told of Boerhaave that, whenever he saw a criminal led out to execution, he would say, "May not this man be better than I? If otherwise, the praise is due, not to me, but the grace of God." Parr used to quote this saying with applause. Such, we doubt not, would have been his own feelings on such an occasion. The Doctor was fond of good living, but was not a _gourmet_. "There are," he says, "certainly one or two luxuries to which I am addicted: the first is a shoulder of mutton, not under-roasted, and richly incrusted with flour and salt; the second is a plain suet-pudding; the third is a plain family plum-pudding; and the fourth, a kind of high-festival dish, consists of hot boiled lobsters, with a profusion of shrimp-sauce." Parr preached the Spital sermon, at Christ Church, on the invitation of the Lord Mayor, Harvey Combe, and as they were coming out of the church together, "Well," said Parr, "how did you like the sermon?" "Why, Doctor," replied his lordship, "there were four things in it that I did not like to hear." "State them." "Why, to speak frankly, then, they were the quarters of the church-clock, which struck four times before you had finished." But his Spital sermon, in 1799, occupied nearly three hours in its delivery. Oddities of John Horne Tooke. The life of this strange person may almost be said to have been commenced with a joke. He was the son of a _poulterer_, named John Horne, in Newport Street, Westminster; or, as he told his schoolfellows, his father was "a _turkey_ merchant." He was educated for the Church, according to his father's wish, and took orders for the bar.