CATHERINE, Queen of England, was the eldest daughter of Sir Thomas Parr of Kendal Castle in Westmoreland, and was born at some date shortly before 1513. Her experience of the trials and vicissitudes of life began early. She was scarcely out of her childhood when her hand was given to Edward, Lord Borough of Gainsborough. Before a few years had passed, her husband died; and she became a widow in her fifteenth year. In a short time afterwards she was again married to John Neville, Lord Latimer; and at the age of twenty she was again left in solitary widowhood. It was this experience which assisted Catherine Parr in playing the difficult part which fell to her lot, when on the 12th July 1543 she was wedded to the royal wife-slayer Henry VIII. How prudently and successfully she played that part is described under England. In 1547, the same year in which her husband the king died, Queen Catherine gave her hand to her former lover, Sir Thomas Seymour, lord-admiral of England. She died in child-bed in 1548, at the age of thirty-five.

SAMUEL, a very distinguished scholar and an acute thinker, was born at Harrow-on-the-Hill on the 15th of January 1747. At Easter 1752 he was admitted on the foundation of Harrow School, at that time conducted by the Rev. Dr Thackeray, and by the time he had attained the age of fourteen, he had, by his diligence and talents, gained the approbation of his successive teachers, and become the head boy of the school. In 1761 Parr, having completed the course of study pursued at Harrow, left school, and was for two or three subsequent years employed by his father in his own profession of apothecary and surgeon. He continued, however, to occupy all his leisure in the study of Greek and Roman literature; and his father, after considerable hesitation, entered him in 1765 at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Here his application to study was enthusiastic, incessant, and severe. His father's death, however, gave a temporary check to his hopes; and he was induced by Dr Summer to accept of a first assistantship in Harrow school.

At Christmas 1769 Parr was ordained to the curacies of Willsden and Kingsbury in Middlesex, the duties of which, in conjunction with those proper to the situation which he held in the school, he continued to discharge till the death of Dr Summer in 1771, when he opened a school on his own account at Stanmore. Not succeeding to his mind in this undertaking, he became master of Colchester school in 1777. During his residence there he took priest's orders, and his curacies were Hythe and Trinity Church. In 1778 he obtained the appointment of head-master of Norwich school, and early in 1779 entered upon the duties of his office. In the following year he published his two sermons On the Truth and Usefulness of Christianity, and On the Education of the Poor. He afterwards, in 1785, resumed the subject of the latter at great length in his Discourse on Education, and on the Plans pursued in Charity Schools. This was the most popular of all his writings, and is a fine monument of its gifted author's enlarged views, pure benevolence, and deep insight into human character.

In 1781 Parr took his degree of Doctor of Laws in the university of Cambridge, after supporting two theses, which were regarded as compositions of superior excellence and merit. In 1783 Bishop Lowth appointed him one of the prebends of St Paul's Cathedral; and during the same year he was presented to the perpetual curacy of Hatton, Warwickshire, to which, after resigning the school at Norwich, he went to reside in 1786. In 1787 appeared the justly-celebrated preface to Bellendenus, which, despite its fulsome flattery of Burke, North, and Fox, to whom it was dedicated, and its virulent political rancour, is undeniably one of the most successful modern imitations of Ciceronian Latin. But while this performance raised his fame, it did not add to his happiness, for it alienated friends, and made foes of those formerly indifferent. In 1790 Dr Parr got involved in an obscure and intricate controversy respecting the authorship of the Bampton Lectures published by Dr White, who seems, together with his coadjutors, to have been guilty of plagiarism.

The Tracts by Warburton and a Warburtonian, not admitted into the collection of their respective works, appeared in 1789, with a dedication addressed by the editor to a learned critic, containing some excellent critical remarks, and abounding at the same time in forcible expression and happy illustration. Of this composition, which it is to be feared was written more with the design of annoying Bishop Hurd, the editor of Warburton, than with any higher motive, Warton is reported to have said, that if he were called upon to point out some of the finest sentences in English prose, he would quote Parr's preface and dedication of the Warburtonian Tracts.

The Birmingham riots of 1791 called forth the Sequel to the printed Paper lately circulated in Warwickshire by the Rev. Charles Curtis, brother of Alderman Curtis, a Birmingham Rector, London, 1792; and A Letter from Irenopolis to the Inhabitants of Eleutheropolis, or a Serious Address to the Dissenters of Birmingham; both admirable specimens of the author's spirited and elegant style. In 1793 a violent pamphlet by Dr Combe occasioned Remarks on the Statement of Dr Charles Combe, by an occasional writer in the British Critic, 1793, written in a temperate, calm, and guarded tone. Parr's famous Spital Sermon of 1800 brought him into collision with Godwin and others of the opposite school of morals.

In 1802 Sir Francis Burdett presented him to the rectory of Graffham in Huntingdonshire. His last publication that is entitled to particular notice is, Characters of the late Charles James Fox, selected, and in part written, by Philopatris Vareicensis, which appeared in 1809. It con- Parrhasius sits partly of extracts from the various public journals, and is partly of an original character, addressed in the form of an epistle to Mr Coke, with an additional volume of notes.

In 1823 Parr's strength began visibly to decline; and on the 6th of March 1825 he died, having completed the seventy-eighth year of his age. Notwithstanding his pre-eminent talents and great learning, Dr Parr left no work behind him destined to live. His natural benevolence and kindness of feeling seems to have been too much cast into the shade by a vain, arrogant, and overbearing temper. When engaged in a polemic, as he too often was, he seemed actuated too much by a fierce party spirit, which led him not unfrequently to forget alike the claims of truth and the courtesies of controversy. He seems to have surpassed all men of his time in his uncommon powers of conversation. In addition to his published writings, Dr Parr left behind him a vast mass of papers, epistolary, historical, critical, and metaphysical. (See his Works, with Memoirs of his Life and Writings, and a Selection from his Correspondence, by John Johnstone, M.D., 8 vols. 8vo, London, 1828.)