s, 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.

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