In the British Museum I discovered a fragmentary collection of ballads and songs, made by Mr. Ballard, and amongst these is a song relating to a very unworthy follower of St. Nicholas, whose memory is thus unhappily preserved: 

THE PARISH CLERK

A NEW COMIC SONG

Tune—­THE VICAR AND MOSES

Here rests from his labours, by consent of his neighbours,
A peevish, ill-natur’d old clerk;
Who never design’d any good to mankind,
For of goodness he ne’er had a spark. 
Tol lol de rol lol de rol lol.

But greedy as Death, until his last breath,
His method he ne’er failed to use;
When interr’d a corpse lay, Amen he’d scarce say,
Before he cry’d Who pays the dues?

Not a tear now he’s dead, by friend or foe shed;
The first they were few, if he’d any;
Of the last he had more, than tongue can count o’er,
Who’d have hang’d the old churl for a penny.

In Levi’s black train, the clerk did remain
Twenty years, squalling o’er a dull stave;
Yet his mind was so evil, he’d swear like the devil,
Nor repented on this side the grave.

         Fowler, Printer, Salisbury.

That extraordinary man Mr. William Hutton, who died in 1813, and whose life has been written and his works edited by Mr. Llewellyn Jewitt, F.S.A., amongst his other poems wrote a set of verses on The Way to Find Sunday without an Almanack.  It tells the story of a Welsh clergyman who kept poultry, and how he told the days of the week and marked the Sundays by the regularity with which one of his hens laid her eggs.  The seventh egg always became his Sunday letter, and thus he always remembered to sally forth “with gown and cassock, book and band,” and perform his accustomed duty.  Unfortunately the clerk was treacherous, and one week stole an egg, with dire consequences to the congregation, which had to wait until the clergyman, who was engaged in the unclerical task of “soleing shoes,” could be fetched.  The poem is a poor trifle, but it is perhaps worth mentioning on account of the personality of the writer.

There is a charming sketch of an old clerk in the Essays and Tales of the late Lady Verney.  The story tells of the old clerk’s affection for his great-grandchild, Benny.  He is a delightfully drawn specimen of his race.  We see him “creeping slowly about the shadows of the aisle, in his long blue Sunday coat with huge brass buttons, the tails of which reached almost to his heels, shorts and brown leggings, and a low-crowned hat in his hand.  He was nearly eighty, but wiry still, rather blind and somewhat deaf; but the post of clerk is one considered to be quite independent and irremovable, quam diu se bene gesserit, during good behaviour—­on a level with Her Majesty’s judges for that matter.  Having been raised to this great eminence some sixty years before, when he was the only man in the parish who could read, he would have stood out for his rights to remain there as long as he pleased against all the powers and principalities in the kingdom—­if, indeed, he could have conceived the possibility of any one, in or out of the parish, being sufficiently irreligious and revolutionary to dispute his sovereignty.  He was part of the church, and the church was part of him—­his rights and hers were indissolubly connected in his mind.