It is reported of an enthusiastic archaeologian that he blessed the day of the Commonwealth because, he said, if Cromwell and all his destructive followers had never lived, there would have been no ruins in the country to repay the antiquary’s researches.  And the converse of this is true of a race of men who before long will be “improved” off the face of the earth, if the restoration of our parish churches is to go on at the present rate.  I allude to the old parish clerks of our boy-hood days.  Who does not remember their quaint figures and quainter, though somewhat irreverent, manner of leading the responses of the congregation?  It is well indeed that our churches, sadly given over to the laxity and carelessness of a bygone age, should be renovated and beautified, the tone of the services raised, and the “bray” of the old clerks, unsuited to the devotional feelings of a more enlightened day, silenced, but still a shade of regret will be mingled with their dismissal, if only for the sake of the large stock of amusing anecdotes which their names recall.

My earliest recollections are connected with old Russell[93], my father’s clerk.  He was a little man but possessed of a consequential manner sufficient for a giant.  A shoemaker by trade, his real element was in the church.  His conversation was embellished by high-flown grandiloquence, and he invariably walked upon the heels of his boots.  This latter peculiarity, as may well be imagined, was the cause of a most comical effect whenever he had occasion to leave his seat and clatter down the aisle of the church.  How often when a boy did I make my old nurse’s sides shake with laughter by imitating old Russell’s walk!  His manner of reading the responses in the service can only be compared to a kind of bellow—­as my father used to say, “he bellowed like a calf”—­and his rendering of parts of it was calculated to raise a smile upon the lips of the most devout.  The following are a few instances of his perversions of the text.  “Leviathan” under his quaint manipulation became “leather thing,” his trade of shoemaker helping him, no doubt, to his interpretation.  Whether he had ever attended a fish-dinner at Greenwich and his mind had thus become impressed with the number and variety of the inhabitants of the deep, history does not record, but, be that as it may, “Bring hither the tabret” was invariably read as “Bring hither the turbot.”  “Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego” did service for “Ananias, Azarias, and Misael” in the “Benedicite,” and “Destructions are come to a perpetual end” was transmogrified into “parental end” in the ninth Psalm.  My father once took the trouble to point out and try to correct some of his inaccuracies, but he never attempted it again.  Old Russell listened attentively and respectfully, but when the lecture was over he dismissed the subject with a superior shake of the head and the disdainful remark, “Well, sir, I have heerd tell of people who think with you.”  Never a bit though did he make any change in his own peculiar rendering of the Bible and Book of Common Prayer.