the preacher has often, with great piety and art enough, handled his subject, and the judicious clerk has with utmost diligence called out two staves proper to the discourse, and I have found in myself and in the rest of the pew good thoughts and dispositions, they have been all in a moment dissipated by a merry jig from the organ loft.”

Dr. Johnson’s definition of a parish clerk in his Dictionary does not convey the whole truth about him and his historic office.  He is defined as “the layman who reads the responses to the congregation in church, to direct the rest.”  The great lexicographer had, however, a high estimation of this official.  Boswell tells us that on one occasion “the Rev. Mr. Palmer, Fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge, dined with us.  He expressed a wish that a better provision were made for parish clerks.  Johnson:  ’Yes, sir, a parish clerk should be a man who is able to make a will or write a letter for anybody in the parish.’” I am afraid that a vast number of our good clerks would have been sore puzzled to perform the first task, and the caligraphy of the letter would in many cases have been curious.

That careful delineator of rural manners as they existed at the end of the eighteenth century, George Crabbe, devotes a whole poem to the parish clerk in his nineteenth letter of The Borough.  He tells of the fortunes of Jachin, the clerk, a grave and austere man, fully orthodox, a Pharisee of the Pharisees, and detecter and opposer of the wiles of Satan.  Here is his picture: 

     “With our late vicar, and his age the same,
     His clerk, bright Jachin, to his office came;
     The like slow speech was his, the like tall slender frame: 
     But Jachin was the gravest man on ground,
     And heard his master’s jokes with look profound;
     For worldly wealth this man of letters sigh’d,
     And had a sprinkling of the spirit’s pride: 
     But he was sober, chaste, devout, and just,
     One whom his neighbours could believe and trust: 
     Of none suspected, neither man nor maid
     By him were wronged, or were of him afraid. 
       There was indeed a frown, a trick of state
     In Jachin:  formal was his air and gait: 
     But if he seemed more solemn and less kind
     Than some light man to light affairs confined,
     Still ’twas allow’d that he should so behave
     As in high seat, and be severely grave.”

The arch-tempter tries in vain to seduce him from the right path.  “The house where swings the tempting sign,” the smiles of damsels, have no power over him.  He “shuns a flowing bowl and rosy lip,” but he is not invulnerable after all.  Want and avarice take possession of his soul.  He begins to take by stealth the money collected in church, putting bran in his pockets so that the coin shall not jingle.  He offends with terror, repeats his offence, grows familiar with crime, and is at last detected by a “stern stout churl, an angry overseer.”  Disgrace, ruin, death soon follow; shunned and despised by all, he “turns to the wall and silently expired.”  A woeful story truly, the results of spiritual pride and greed of gain!  It is to be hoped that few clerks resembled poor lost Jachin.