He delivered his justly celebrated SPITAL SERMON in the accustomed place, Christ-Church, Newgate Street, Easter Tuesday, 1800, before his friend, Harvey Christian Combe, Esq., M.P., the celebrated brewer, then Lord Mayor. "Before the service begun," says one of his friends, "I went into the vestry, and found Dr. Parr seated, with pipes and tobacco placed before him on the table. He evidently felt the importance of the occasion, but felt, at the same time, a confidence in his own powers. When he ascended the pulpit, a profound silence prevailed. The sermon occupied nearly an hour and a quarter in the delivery; and in allusion to its extreme length, it was remarked by a lady, who had been asked her opinion of it, "enough there is, and more than enough"--the first words of its first sentence,--a _bon mot_ he is said to have received with good humour. As he and the Lord Mayor were coming out of the church, the latter, albeit unused to the facetious mode, "Well," said Dr. Parr to him, always anxious for well-merited praise, "how did you like the sermon? Let me have the suffrage of your strong and honest understanding." "Why, Doctor," returned his lordship, "there were four things in your sermon I did _not_ like to hear." "State them," replied Parr, eagerly. "Why, to speak frankly, then," said Combe, "they were the quarters of the church clock, which struck four times before you had finished it." "I once saw, lying in the Chapter Coffee-house," says Dyer, in a letter printed in Parriana, "the Doctor's _Spital Sermon_, with a comical caricature of him, in the pulpit, preaching and smoking at the same time, with _ex fumo dare lucem_ issuing from his mouth." ANOTHER CLASS OF PREACHERS At Cambridge, and eke at Oxford, have taken an opposite course, and from their being to be had at all times, have at the former place, obtained the _soubriquet_ "Hack Preachers." In the _Gradus ad Cantabrigiam_, they are described as "the common _exhibitioners_ at St. Mary's, employed in the service of defaulters and absentees. It must be confessed, however," adds this writer, "that these HACKS are good fast _trotters_, as they commonly go over the course in twenty minutes, and sometimes less." Gilbert Wakefield, whom nobody will suspect of forbearance, calls them, in his Memoirs, "a piteous, unedifying tribe." This, however, can scarcely be applied to the ordinary preachers of the present day, and especial care is taken by the heads of the university that the _select_ preachers (one of whom is named for each month during term-time) do not name substitutes themselves. The following poetic _jeu d'esprit_, entitled "_Lines on three of the appointed Preachers of St. Mary's, Cambridge, attacking Calvin_" were no others than the three eminent living divines, Dr. Butler, Dr. Maltby, Bishop of Chichester, and Dr. Herbert Marsh, Bishop of Peterborough:--