PARRIANA,
OF all the laborious nothings, of all the farraginous hotchpotches that was ever collected, we have never seen any to lie compared to Parriana. We formerly gave our opinion . of the first volume, but we cannot refrain from again expressing our astonishment that there exists any man so absurd as to persist in the compilation of a book on such a plan, or rather such a want of plan. . He had better have published his commonplace-book at once : there at least we should have found some order, and it would have been easy to ascertain what there was not in his book—as it is, it gives a headache to discover its nullity. Conceive a very dull but industrious stringing of whole volumes of extracts together, by means of some remote or fanciful connexion with the name of Dr. PARR: add also, that these extracts are accumulated without taste, that their point is generally destroyed when they have had point, and that they are tacked to one another by the incessant use of the figure commonly exemplified by the phrase apropos des bottes : such is ParriUna,—the wonder of the day—that it should be written— and then that it should be bought.
* Parriana. By Edmund Henry Barker. Vol. II. London, 1829.
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