Doctor Samuel Parr
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.”