A companion picture to the disgraced clerk is that of “the noble peasant Isaac Ashford[40],” who won from Crabbe’s pen a gracious panegyric.  He says of him: 

     “Noble he was, contemning all things mean,
     His truth unquestioned, and his soul serene.

* * * * *

     If pride were his, ’twas not their vulgar pride,
     Who, in their base contempt, the great deride: 
     Nor pride in learning—­though by Clerk agreed,
     If fate should call him, Ashford might succeed.”

[Footnote 40:  The Parish Register, Part III.]

He paints yet another portrait, that of old Dibble[41], clerk and sexton: 

     “His eightieth year he reach’d still undecayed,
     And rectors five to one close vault conveyed.

* * * * *

     His masters lost, he’d oft in turn deplore,
     And kindly add,—­’Heaven grant I lose no more!’
     Yet while he spake, a sly and pleasant glance
     Appear’d at variance with his complaisance: 
     For as he told their fate and varying worth,
     He archly looked—­’I yet may bear thee forth.’”

[Footnote 41:  The Parish Register, Part III.]

George Herbert, the saintly Christian poet, who sang on earth such hymns and anthems as the angels sing in heaven, was no friend of the old-fashioned duet between the minister and clerk in the conduct of divine service.  He would have no “talking, or sleeping, or gazing, or leaning, or half-kneeling, or any undutiful behaviour in them.”  Moreover, “everyone, man and child, should answer aloud both Amen and all other answers which are on the clerk’s and people’s part to answer, which answers also are to be done not in a huddling or slubbering fashion, gaping, or scratching the head, or spitting even in the midst of their answer, but gently and pausably, thinking what they say, so that while they answer ‘As it was in the beginning, etc.,’ they meditate as they speak, that God hath ever had his people that have glorified Him as well as now, and that He shall have so for ever.  And the like in other answers.”

Cowper’s kindliness of heart is abundantly evinced by his treatment of a parish clerk, one John Cox, the official of the parish of All Saints, Northampton.  The poet was living in the little Buckinghamshire village of Weston Underwood, having left Olney when mouldering walls and a tottering house warned him to depart.  He was recovering from his dread malady, and beginning to feel the pleasures and inconveniences of authorship and fame.  The most amusing proof of his celebrity and his good nature is thus related to Lady Hesketh: