Cuthbert Bede tells the story of a poetical clerk who was much aggrieved because some disagreeable and naughty folk had maliciously damaged his garden fence.  On the next Sunday he gave out “a stave of his own composing”: 

     “Oh, Lord, how doth the wicked man;
       They increases more and more;
     They break the posts, likewise the rails
       Around this poor clerk’s door.”

He almost deserved his fate for barbarously mutilating a metrical Psalm, and was evidently a proper victim of poetical justice.

A Devonshire clerk wrote the following noble effort:—­

     “Mount Edgcumbe is a pleasant place
     Right o’er agenst the Ham-o-aze,
     Where ships do ride at anchor,
     To guard us agin our foes.  Amen.”

Besides writing “hymns of his own composing,” the parish clerk often used to give vent to his poetical talents in the production of epitaphs.  The occupation of writing epitaphs must have been a lucrative one, and the effusions recording the numerous virtues of the deceased are quaint and curious.  Well might a modern English child ask her mother after hearing these records read to her, “Where were all the bad people buried?” Learned scholars and abbots applied their talents to the production of the Latin verses inscribed on old brass memorials of the dead, and clever ladies like Dame Elizabeth Hobby sometimes wrote them and appended their names to their compositions.  In later times this task seems to have been often undertaken by the parish clerk with not altogether satisfactory results, though incumbents and great poets, among whom may be enumerated Pope and Byron, sometimes wrote memorials of their friends.  But the clerk was usually responsible for these inscriptions.  Master John Hopkins, clerk at one of the churches at Salisbury at the end of the eighteenth century, issued an advertisement of his various accomplishments which ran thus: 

“John Hopkins, parish clerk and undertaker, sells epitaphs of all sorts and prices.  Shaves neat, and plays the bassoon.  Teeth drawn, and the Salisbury Journal read gratis every Sunday morning at eight.  A school for psalmody every Thursday evening, when my son, born blind, will play the fiddle.  Specimen epitaph on my wife: 

     My wife ten years, not much to my ease,
     But now she is dead, in caelo quies.

     Great variety to be seen within.  Your humble servant, John
     Hopkins.”

Poor David Diggs, the hero of Hewett’s story of The Parish Clerk, used to write epitaphs in strange and curious English.  Just before his death he put a small piece of paper into the hands of the clergyman of the parish, and whispered a request that its contents might be attended to.  When the clergyman afterwards read the paper he found the following epitaph, which was duly inscribed on the clerk’s grave: 

     “Reader Don’t stop nor shed no tears
     For I was parish clerk For 60 years;
     If I lived on I could not now as Then
     Say to the Parson’s Prases A loud Amen.”