plete recollection of the verses in question; and, although these were by no means complimentary to his external graces or suavity of manners, which, indeed, were never very remarkable, he now, with great good humour, repeated them.

Dr. Drury was not fortunate enough to be among the number of scholars elected from Westminster to Christ Church, a matter in which interest was very predominant, and, in consequence, passed to Trinity College, Cambridge, where the advantages, both present and prospective, in point of pecuniary provision for academical education, are of considerably less value for king's scholars. He entered at Trinity in 1768; and was placed under the tuition of Watson, subsequently the well-known Bishop of Llandaff, for whose instructions he always expressed the deepest respect and gratitude. He had not, however, kept many terms in the university before it was evident that domestic circumstances -the "res angusta domi”—would compel him to enter, by some means or other, on the active business of life earlier than most men of the same education and habits. His father's means had become even less adequate than before to furnish the supplies for college residence; and he was thus deprived of the opportunity, of which he was otherwise so capable of availing himself, of aiming at academical distinctions and emoluments, which might have forwarded his views in life, and extended his fame as a scholar. The case of Samuel Parr, a future giant in learning, was an exact parallel; and both were shortly to be thrown together on the same arena, sent to it somewhat prematurely by similar domestic circumstances. Parr, who was some years older than the subject of this memoir, had, at this time, already commenced his career. Before Mr. Drury had quite completed his twentieth year, Dr. Sumner, at that time head master of Harrow, had applied to Dr. Watson to recommend him some gentleman of good talent and scholarship to succeed to a vacant assistantship at that place. Such was the steadiness of conduct and manliness of mind, combined with sound knowledge, for his years, in Mr. Drury, that Dr. Watson did not hesitate to

propose the situation to him, and recommend, that what remained of necessary college residence should be kept at such times and intervals as he could contrive to absent himself from the occupations on which he was about to enter. The strong recommendations of the tutor, together with the pupil's own desire, and sense of the necessity of relying exclusively on his own mental resources, soon decided him to accept the offer; and he embarked on the world for him. self at this early age.

Robert Sumner, D.D., who had been lately a fellow of King's College, Cambridge, was at this period head master of Harrow, which school was now in high repute, containing about two hundred and fifty scholars, a large proportion of whom were youths of the best connections in the country. Sumner had succeeded Dr. Thackeray in that post in 1760. At this time (1769) he was not above thirty-eight years of age; a circumstance which was of some importance to his young assistant, as the latter fell more easily into habits of ease and familiarity with a superior of that time of life, than he probably might have done with a gentleman of more advanced years: and he always spoke with great warmth of feeling of the advantages he received from this species of intercourse with a man of such a powerful and well-stored mind. The Rev. Messrs. Wadeson and Roderick were (together with Parr, who has been already mentioned,) his colleagues at his entrance on his office; and of these early associates he was fond, in after-life, of often tracing the memory. It was not, however, destined that the party should continue long together; the premature death of Dr. Sumner, at the age of forty-one, in 1771, broke it up altogether. But even this short period, passed in close observation of a man of the most varied knowledge and brilliant conversation, was not likely to be lost upon one who had by nature the highest relish for these excellences. The character of Sumner has been drawn with all the warmth of affection and zeal of admiration by his pupil Sir William Jones, in his preface to the History of Asiatic Poetry; but neither that panegyric, nor

the elaborate inscription to his memory, by his pupil and friend Parr, in the church of Harrow, at all exceed the tone in which Dr. Drury always spoke of his early counsellor and, we may say, instructor. It is to be regretted that Dr. Parr never put together the memoir of the life and conversations of this able man, for which so much material was found to have been drawn together, among his papers, by his executors. Short as this intercourse was, it had a lasting effect on the manners and habits of the young instructor; for there was a great deal of that in Dr. Drury, in after-life, which was so much extolled in Sumner. A high and noble tone of feeling, a most ready and persuasive eloquence, a richness of language and copiousness of illustration, aided by a particularly fine delivery, seem to have been remarkable in both, and not the less so, that there was in both occasionally a tendency to the "Asiaticum dicendi genus." In external manners, also; in that suavity and elegance for which the subject of these pages was, through life, very conspicuous; and in the way in which playfulness of imagination was invariably under the control of good taste, much was probably to be ascribed to this early association.

The succession to the vacant chair of Sumner was warmly contested by Benjamin Heath, of Eton, and Parr. In Dr. J. Johnstone's memoirs of Parr, prefixed to the late collection of his writings, will be found a very ample and, we believe, accurate detail of the whole business. The boys were naturally, and at first commendably, interested, for a native of the village, an ornament to their school in his youth, (of which he, Sir W. Jones, and Bennet, afterwards Bishop of Cloyne, had been the pride in their day,) and so very able an instructor of themselves in his manhood; and they attempted, first, by a memorial to the electors, to influence their choice; and, subsequently, on Dr. Heath's success being made known, to evince their resentment by many acts of juvenile petulance. Parr had too manly a mind to be accessary to any such conduct, and always spoke of his successful antagonist with the respect which his character and learning so

justly demanded. It was not likely that he should consent to retain his post as a subaltern under a new commander; and, in consequence, he not only relinquished his situation at Harrow, but was accompanied to the neighbouring village of Stanmore, where he established a school, by about sixty seceders. On this occasion he invited two of his colleagues, Mr. Drury and Mr. Roderick, to accompany him. The latter followed the fortunes of his friend to Stanmore; the former, after some deliberation, determined to remain at Harrow. His association with Parr, in their joint labours, had not been of much more than two years' duration; so that no very intimate union had been formed between them. There was also a good deal of dissimilarity in their general manners and habits, although on neither side prejudicial to mutual respect. Their intercourse, in after years, was not very frequent, either personally or by correspondence; yet was it occasionally kept alive by mutual acts of remembrance; and, at a distance of near sixty years from the time of their separation, Parr, in the bequest of a ring, as a token of early regard, mentions the name of Drury, to whom he leaves it, as that of the "deservedly successful master of Harrow school." The Rev. I. Smith, at that time rector of Stanmore, who had been brought up at Lichfield, with Johnson and Garrick, was a man very remarkable for the elegance of his wit, and fertility of his imagination. Mr. Drury took great delight in his society, and that of the very clever men he assembled round his fireside; but it unfortunately happened that Parr, owing to some offence taken by him, ceased to be one of them very soon after he had established himself at Stanmore. Mr. Smith died in 1781. Mr. Drury performed the last services of our church over his remains, and inscribed a simple sentence or two on his tomb; the expressed wishes of the deceased forbidding any more elaborate notice of his talents.

Dr. B. Heath, after a good deal of opposition, having at length firmly established himself at Harrow, the wide connections of the school, and the undoubted abilities of its

masters, soon rendered the short-lived rivalry of Stanmore a matter of little moment. For fourteen years, in addition to those passed under Sumner, the subject of this memoir continued to instruct with uniform diligence, judgment, and discretion; to rouse the indolence of the sluggish; to direct the taste, and control the exuberance, of the imaginative; and, both by precept and a most persuasive example, to sow the seeds of moral and religious excellence, not without the external ornament of those manners which become an English gentleman.

In 1777, Mr. Drury married Louisa, youngest daughter of Benjamin Heath, Esq., LL.D., of Exeter, and sister of the head master of Harrow, as, also, of Dr. George Heath, afterwards Master of Eton and Canon of Windsor, on the same day in which her sister Rose was united to the Rev. Thomas Bromley, also one of the assistant masters of Harrow. Mr. Heath of Exeter was one of the first classical scholars of the age, and well known as such both at home and abroad. His "Notæ in veteres Tragicos Græcos" is a work very remarkable for critical acuteness, and for soundness of learning. His "Revisal of Shakspeare's Text," addressed to Lord Kaimes, and originating in the writer's estimate of Warburton," the licentiousness of whose criticism overleaps all bounds or restraint, while the slightest glitter of a heated imagination is sufficient to mislead him into the most improbable conjectures," was also a performance of great vigour and taste. From him, too, came the first nucleus of that library which, having descended to his son Benjamin, afterwards expanded into the Bibliotheca Heathiana, the memory of the sale of which is still fresh in the minds of collectors. To some who are fond of local association, it may not be uninteresting to be told that the house in which Mr. Drury resided after his marriage, until his appointment to the head mastership, was that next the inn at the entrance of Harrow from London. Amongst his earlier inmates and pupils, while he continued to reside there, were the two sons of Lord Charles Spencer, the present Marquis of Westminster,