“So prays your clerk with all his heart,
       And, ere he quits his pen,
     Begs you for once to take his part,
       And answer all—­Amen.”

Again, in another copy of verses he alludes to his honourable clerkship, and sings: 

     “So your verse-man I, and clerk,
       Yearly in my song proclaim
     Death at hand—­yourselves his mark—­
       And the foe’s unerring aim.

     “Duly at my time I come,
       Publishing to all aloud
     Soon the grave must be our home,
       And your only suit a shroud.”

On one occasion the clerk delayed to send a printed copy of the verses; so we find the poet writing to his friend, William Bagot: 

“You would long since have received an answer to your last, had not the wicked clerk of Northampton delayed to send me the printed copy of my annual dirge, which I waited to enclose.  Here it is at last, and much good may it do the readers!”

Let us hope that at least the clerk was grateful.

Yet again does the poet allude to the occupant of the lowest tier of the great “three-decker,” when he in the opening lines of The Sofa depicts the various seekers after sleep.  After telling of the snoring nurse, the sleeping traveller in the coach, he continues: 

     “Sweet sleep enjoys the curate in his desk,
     The tedious rector drawling o’er his head;
     And sweet the clerk below—­”

a pretty picture truly of a stirring and impressive service!

Cowper, if he were alive now, would have been no admirer of Who’s Who, and poured scorn upon any

     “Fond attempt to give a deathless lot
     To names ignoble, born to be forgot.”

Beholding some “names of little note” in the Biographia Britannica, he proceeded to satirise the publication, to laugh at the imaginary procession of worthies—­the squire, his lady, the vicar, and other local celebrities, and chants in his anger: 

     “There goes the parson, oh! illustrious spark! 
     And there, scarce less illustrious, goes the clerk.”

The poet Gay is not unmindful of the

     “Parish clerk who calls the hymns so clear”;

and Tennyson, in his sonnet to J.M.K., wrote: 

     “Our dusty velvets have much need of thee: 
     Thou art no sabbath-drawler of old saws,
     Distill’d from some worm-canker’d homily;
     But spurr’d at heart with fiercest energy
     To embattail and to wall about thy cause
     With iron-worded proof, hating to hark
     The humming of the drowsy pulpit-drone
     Half God’s good Sabbath, while the worn-out clerk
     Brow-beats his desk below.”

In the gallery of Dickens’s characters stands out the immortal Solomon Daisy of Barnaby Rudge, with his “cricket-like chirrup” as he took his part in the social gossip round the Maypole fire.  Readers of Dickens will remember the timid Solomon’s visit to the church at midnight when he went to toll the passing bell, and his account of the strange things that befell him there, and of the ringing of the mysterious bell that told the murder of Reuben Haredale.