t few clerks resembled poor lost Jachin.

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 dre