Note 315 — QUARRELS OF AUTHORS; (continued 3)

Parker’s father was a lawyer, and one of Oliver’s most submissive sub-committee men, who so long pillaged the nation and spilled its blood, “not in the hot and military way (which diminishes always the offence), but in the cooler blood and sedentary execution of an high court of justice.” He wrote a very remarkable book (after he had been petitioned against for a misdemeanour) in defence of that usurped irregular state called “The Government of the People of England.” It had “a most hieroglyphical title” of several emblems: two hands joined, and beneath a sheaf of arrows, stuffed about with half-a-dozen mottoes, “enough,” says Marvell, “to have supplied the mantlings and achievement of this (godly) family.” An anecdote in this secret history of Parker is probably true. “He shortly afterwards did inveigh against his father’s memory, and in his mother’s presence, before witnesses, for a couple of whining fanatics.”—Rehearsal Transprosed, second part, p. 75.